Associations for Disruptiveness: The Pirate Bay vs. Spotify
Björn Remneland Wikhamn, David Knights · Journal of technology management & innovation · 2016
Most studies on disruptive innovations adopt technology-centric assumptions when explaining how industries are affected by a technology's creative destruction.This paper argues that the power of a technology lies in how it performatively associates with the cultural and social norms of the wider society.Hence, a technology is not disruptive or sustaining in itself but is potentially a productive outcome of network linkages with other social and material elements.To illustrate this claim, two digital music services will be analyzed, respectively a misfit and a maverick both challenging mainstream providers of music -The Pirate Bay and Spotify -in relation to each other and how they are positioned toward the transformation of the music industry as a whole.