The Co-creative Spin-off of Boycotting and Buycotting

Co-creation, also referred to as prosumption, specifies the context where users play a central role not just as consumers but also as producers of a revenue-generating business. Among many others, Spotify, the widely popular online music streaming company, is one co-creation business example that facilitates user-made artistic goods as part of its core business model (Rayna & Striukova, 2021). Founded in 2008 in Sweden, Spotify’s business model mostly relies upon advertising revenues instead of subscription fees, while only the advertising-averse users pay for its premium ad-free streaming services. As an innovative business model, it offers consumers a platform that avoids copyright infringement for music listeners while providing the music industry with financial contribution from the revenue generated from the advertisements that music listeners are exposed to as they listen to music. Yet, with the pandemic-based political in situ, news broke that some content creator artists started to challenge the technology unicorn that they had been supporting with their co-creativity. Artists have publicly declared that they chose to remove their content from Spotify as a reaction to the anti-vaccine content that it continued to host despite the open calls from many scientists and medical experts for the company to take preventive action against the spread of misleading and false claims. The political activism unfolding amongst the musician content providers, which constitute the basis – the music to listen to – for Spotify to facilitate the revenue-generating traffic of advertisements and listeners, is presenting a case that is yet to be explored in the emerging literature. As one musician said, “private companies have the right to choose what they profit from, just as I can choose not to have my music support a platform that disseminates harmful information” (Sherwood, 2022). Past literature on consumer behavior examines both boycotting (punishing business for unfavorable behavior) and buycotting (rewarding business for favorable behavior) as part of the political activism (Kam & Deichert, 2020; Neilson, 2010) but spares the co-creation space, where producotting recently unfolded in the example of Spotify. This manuscript aims to conceptualize the producotting, which is identified as a co-creator’s engagement to punish a co-creative business for its unfavorable behavior. A discourse analysis is planned on the publicly available resources to unpack the mechanisms, hindrances, and facilitators that lead to the act of producotting amongst the co-creators of artistic content in Spotify. The findings are expected to contribute to future studies on political prosumerism.