The community model of content management

Abstract

Peer-to-peer architectures for sharing pieces of music illustrate how quickly consumers adopt novel structures - as long as they provide clear incentives. The services MP3.com, Napster, and gnutella are alternatives to the classical architecture of the value chain in which the music industry had a prominent role. We present a community model for content management and analyze system architectures, value chains, the relation between content and community management, and the trend towards peer-to-peer architectures. We argue that the traditional content is being increasingly embedded in a social, economic and organizational context and that therefore content management can hardly be separated from community management. We explain this comparing traditional and novel peer-to-peer content and community management of the music industry. © 2002 Kluwer Academic Publishers.