Victoria Walter

Victoria Walter is a master student at the Johannes Gutenberg-University in Mainz, currently finishing her degree in Media Management. In her studies, she is focusing on consumer preferences and their willingness-to-pay in the field of subscription-based audio-streaming-services.            

In the past few years, audio-streaming-services have clearly gained in popularity, fundamentally transforming the way that people access and use audio content by making music and other audio formats ubiquitously available. The audio-streaming market itself can be characterized by a high intensity of competition since consumers get to choose among a large number of different audio-streaming-platforms that compete for both market shares and paying premium users. Since the monthly subscription fee of paying premium users serves as one of the biggest sources of income of audio-streaming-services, it is important for their subscription-based premium offer to be aligned with consumer needs in order to attract a large number of users and to prevail against the competition. Audio-streaming-services hence need to be endeavored to take a customer-oriented perspective and design their subscription-based offerings according to consumers’ needs and preferences.

Based on her findings on the users’ most valued product attributes as well as their willingness-to-pay, Victoria will draw important implications for the optimization of subscription-based audio-streaming-services. In this context, it will be examined to what degree consumers differ in terms of the value they place on different product attributes and whether the strategy of versioning can serve as a suitable approach for audio-streaming-services in order to meet the heterogeneous consumer preferences and willingness-to-pay.