Consumers' intentions to subscribe to music streaming services

Digitalization has had a tremendous effect on the music industry and consequently the size of the industry has more than halved during the new millennium. The reason for the falling revenues of the industry lies in growing competition with other entertainment industries, digital music piracy, and poor service models that provide much less revenue for the industry as the previously dominant CD format. The industry is currently in transition from physical to digital and consumers need to be directed to use digital services that provide value to the industry. The most advanced and profitable digital service model today is the paid MaaS (Music as a Service) model, also known as subscription-based music streaming. Paid MaaS services are the fastest growing consumption model of music and their growth underpinned the first positive year for the recording industry in nearly two decades. So that the music industry could continue and accelerate its new-found growth, this thesis intends to find out the factors that affect consumers' behavioral intentions to adopt paid MaaS services. The research framework of this thesis is built from previous information services (IS) adoption literature, using effort expectancy (EE), facilitating conditions (FC), habit (HT), hedonic motivation (HM), perceived usefulness (PU), price value (PV), and social influence (SI) as hypothesized factors affecting consumers' behavioral intentions to use paid MaaS, as well as tangibility preference (TP), which is an extension to previous theories. The results of a survey with 136 participants indicate that HT, HM, and PV act as direct determinants of consumers' behavioral intention to use paid MaaS, explaining 53% of the variance in behavioral intention. The study has both, managerial and theoretical implications. It suggests that paid MaaS services should focus on providing their users a good price value and hedonic pleasure, while exploiting consumers' tendency for habitual system usage. On a theoretical side, this study sheds light on factors that determine the behavioral intention to use hedonic information systems. It suggests that in a highly hedonic IS system the determinant of PU loses its predictive power over behavioral intention and the importance of HM increases