Back to the past to charter the vinyl electronic market

• Autor(a) principal: Lousão, Sara Carolina Augusto
• Data de Publicação: 2019
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10071/20301
• topic: Vinyl record; Price; Data Science; Vinil; Preços; Ciência dos dados

For the past decades, the astounding rhythm of technological evolution and the massification of advanced digital devices, have forced several companies and entire market sectors to choose between reinventing themselves or perishing into obsoleteness. A great example is the Entertainment industry, where entire sectors were replaced by digital content platforms. This thesis focuses on, perhaps the most iconic media format of all time, the vinyl record. Vinyl was one of the first formats for audio reproduction, created around 1920, managing to become increasingly more popular until the 80’s, when the invention of the Compact Disc finally replaced the vinyl. This was mainly due to the lower costs of production of the CD, as well as requiring less space and maintenance, becoming easier to distribute. Interestingly, vinyl made a small comeback, mainly due to avid collectors who unknowingly created a community that kept the format alive. The goal of this study is to understand which factors, involved in the buying and selling of vinyl, influenced its price, with the initial hypothesis considering record labels and popular rankings to be some of the most contributing variables. To be able to evaluate this, four datasets were created in an endeavor to represent recent and past records of two different genres, Rock and Jazz, by extracting data from Discogs’ marketplace and Billboard’s Hot 100 chart. For this research, the chosen work methodology was CRISP-DM and the software programs for data analysis were SAS Enterprise Guide and SAS Enterprise Miner. Such approach allowed unveiling that an artist’s presence in the charts and their labels belonging to one of the ‘Big three’, do not always dictate their records at highest prices. The results also showed that features which measure popularity become more relevant in the ‘era’ where the record’s genre is more popular and that big record labels have been losing market share to an increasing number of independent labels.