Come Together: Coalition Development, Record Store Day, and a Reconfiguration of Music Retail

• In Event: 463 - Section on Collective Behavior and Social Movements Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Section on Collective Behavior and Social Movements Roundtables (one-hour). Table 01. Coalition Building in Social Movements

Abstract

On the third Saturday of April annually, independent record stores across the country celebrate Record Store Day (RSD), a celebration of “the unique culture of a record store and the special role these independently owned stores play in their communities.” The massive success of RSD has contributed to a 506 percent increase in vinyl record sales and is regularly credited with the survival of these independent retailers in an industry that has largely transitioned to online and mobile technologies. In this paper, I investigate how organizational collaboration, culminating in RSD, has enabled firms to capitalize on shared tactics and field understandings. Through qualitative interviews and content analysis of media and industry documents, I detail field conditions leading up to the field configuring event that set RSD in motion. I find the establishment and development of organizational collaboration through coalitions produced the relational structuring necessary for a field configuring event. These findings contribute to an emerging literature on field configuring events by identifying mechanisms within a field that enable the initiation of new, organized field patterns.

Author

• Jerome M Hendricks, University of Illinois-Chicago