Bowing to Five Pecks of Rice? The Impact of Profit Expectancy on Artistic Creativity

Abstract

Do independent and amateur producers in cultural industries curtail their creativity when they have higher expectations of economic returns? Previous studies on the “creative/commerce” pair of the cultural industries did not provide a clear answer. This paper tries to answer this question by studying the case of Chinesemusic.com, a music streaming platform that launched a monetization program, allowing musicians to directly profit from their songs on the platform. I collect 16,320 songs from the platform released before and after the launch of the monetization program and, using computational tools developed in the field of Music Information Retrieval, I propose a novel approach to measure the creativity of the songs based on their sound. The results suggest that whilst more independent and amateur musicians were attracted by the monetization program, their songs became less and less creative afterward with a more significant shift among the former. The findings indicate that independent and amateur producers will proactively make compromises in their creative activities when they are given resources for a more promising career in the business.