Whatever you want, whatever you like: how incumbents respond to changes in market information regimes

How do incumbents respond to a market information regime change? We employ literature on product portfolio strategies and capability adaptation to analyze the information regime change induced by the advent of streaming in the U.S. music industry. Our findings highlight first that an information change impacts the strategy of organizations. We then observe that the inclusion of streaming reveals increasing demand for novelty and variety. Finally, we identify breadth of experience as a driver of the type of innovation adopted. Incumbents with broader experience proliferate across-niches. Incumbents with focused experience increase the novelty of their offerings. Overall, incumbents with higher breadth of experience perform better than others. We discuss the implications of these results in literatures of environmental changes, capability adaptation, product proliferation, and democratization induced by new technologies.