ABSTRACT
Brand communities create brand value. This also occurs with music where brand communities are associated with artists’ brands. Record labels traditionally control commercialisation of these brands, yet artists have begun to leverage brand communities to negotiate control over their brand – associations linked to various services (e.g. concerts) and products (e.g. songs). Where brand communities employ moral responsibility to sustain themselves, we identify how such communities may also leverage moral responsibility to protect the brand from perceived challenges to ownership, including the very record labels intimately involved in building these brands. Our ethnographic examination of a prominent brand community, Taylor Swift’s ‘Swifties’, explains how moral responsibility is employed by the community to protect and revitalise the brand.
