The race for innovation in the media and content industries: legacy players and newcomers. Lessons from the music and newspaper industries

Cultural and creative industries (CCIs) are usually associated to "creativity" while high-tech industries are usually linked to "innovation". This distinction determines a sort of forgetfulness of the fact that also CCIs rely always on various series of updated technologies. As a consequence, the issue of innovation in CCIs is seldom dealt with. Nonetheless, one can wonder how do these industries really innovate and how they compete with powerful new competitors from the information technology (IT) world. This is the aim of this article focused on the music recording and the newspaper publishing industries. It explores how these industries are coping with subsequent waves of technologies. Recent findings provide a fresh understanding of the place and the very nature of innovation in these industries that, in fact, do not boil down to simply creating new contents. Instead, economic dynamics have recently been opened showing that CCIs are based on regular capacity for innovations which are nevertheless deployed in very different ways. The paper blends a general outlook that sets the scene of the transformations each industry went through with some selected case studies so as to highlight some innovative elements in every subsector. These case studies are followed by an analysis of the new players that build their position from technical intermediation functions. It reveals how "intermediaries"