Abstract
The social standing of an artist provides a reliable proxy for the value of the artist’s product and reduces uncertainty about the quality of the product. While there are several different types of social standing, we focus on reputation among professional artists within the same genre, as they are best able to identify the artistic value of a product within that genre. To reveal the underlying means of attaining high social standing within the professional group, we examined two quantifiable properties that are closely associated with social standing, musical identity and the social position of the artist. We analyzed the playlist data of electronic dance music DJ/producers, DJs who also compose their own music. We crawled 98,332 tracks from 3,164 playlists by 815 DJs, who played at nine notable international music festivals. Information from the DJs’ tracks, including genre, beats per minute, and musical keys, was used to quantify musical identity, and playlists were transformed into network data to measure social positions among the DJs. We found that DJs with a distinct genre identity as well as network positions combining brokerage and cohesion tend to place higher in success and social standing.
Highlights
“Cultural markets,” such as the music market, have traditionally confronted uncertainty issues in terms of product quality [1] because these markets elude mechanistic and systematic evaluations and call for a complex mixture of formalized knowledge, informal reference, experience, taste, and personal judgment [2]
Models 1 and 2 include either social position or musical identity as variables to test the significant association of each independent variable with social standing
This study investigates how social standing is attained within a professional group of artists whose members play a key role in evaluating their artistic products in the electronic dance music (EDM) market
Summary
“Cultural markets,” such as the music market, have traditionally confronted uncertainty issues in terms of product quality [1] because these markets elude mechanistic and systematic evaluations and call for a complex mixture of formalized knowledge, informal reference, experience, taste, and personal judgment [2]. Podolny [3] suggests that social standing may be a useful measure to evaluate artistic products in markets with high uncertainty. A market of singularities cannot function without evaluation by experts [4]; while there are several different types of social standing, the artist’s reputation within a group of peers who create competing products merits attention. This is because, given the limited access to expertise, reputation among professional artists provides consumers with a more reliable reference
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