Industry or Field? The Value of the Field Construct to Study Digital Creative Industries

Abstract

Traditionally established roles in creative industries, such as “producer”, “distributor” and “consumer”, have now become much more fluid. For example, consumers increasingly take up the role of (co-)producers of creative content by engaging in digitally-enabled practices of content’s sampling, sharing or mashing-up (e.g. Troilo, 2015); or serve the role of “critics” by striving to act as “influencers” on social media platforms (Etter, Ravasi and Colleoni, 2018). Meantime, digital distributors such as Netflix have become producers, while local creative producers (e.g. artists) have become distributors of their own content (Hirsch and Gruber, 2015).