When Breaking the Law Gets You the Job: Evidence from the Electronic Dance Music Community

Why would a law-abiding occupational community support members engagedin legally prohibited actions? We propose that lawbreaking can elicit informalsupport when it is construed as a disinterested action—intended to serve thecommunity rather than the perpetrator. We study how illegal remixing (‘‘boot-legging’’) affects an artist’s ability to secure opening act and other performanceopportunities in the electronic dance music (EDM) community, whose mem-bers endorse the substance of copyright law but whose norms about bootleg-ging are ambiguous. Data on 38,784 disc jockeys (DJs) across 97 countriesover 10 years reveal that producing bootlegs is associated with more opportu-nities to perform, compared to producing official remixes or original music. Thiseffect disappears when community members view bootlegging as a self-serving action—primarily designed to benefit the perpetrator. An online experi-ment and an expert survey rule out the possibility that bootlegs are consideredmore creative, of higher quality, or better able to attract attention. We shedadditional light on our proposed mechanism by analyzing data from 34 inter-views with EDM professionals. This helps us to explain how a lawbreaker canparadoxically be perceived as serving the community, thereby eliciting activecommunity support for their action.