Online Music Community Research Articles

The costliest signals of authenticity? How iconic deaths transform audience reception in hip-hop

The death of an artist can act as a costly signal of their authenticity, and cause enduring changes in audience valuations of their work. Drawing on novel digital trace data of audience evaluations from a major online music community, we show how the death of an hip-hop artist induces improvements to the valuations of their antemortem work. Such death-induced changes to audience valuations are mediated by the ability of some deaths – what we term iconic deaths – to act as costly signals of an artist’s authenticity. Iconic deaths that better signal authenticity produce greater death-induced improvements in audience valuations. Such costly signaling effects are more salient within discredited subgenres of hip-hop. We show how this is robust to complementary explanations, such as sympathetic eulogizing or audience expansion effects.

Cognitive Economy and Product Categorization

In mediated markets, the categorization of products by mediators is critical to efficient interaction between producers and consumers. As organizational research tends to focus on the consequences of categorization rather than its antecedents, however, we know relatively little about why mediators assign one category label or another to a product. In this study, we argue that two informational properties of labels, specificity and distinctiveness, determine the outcomes of mediators’ categorization decisions. Our analysis of product categorization decisions made by members of an online music community, 2000–2020, supports this argument. We find that a label’s odds of being assigned to a product increase (a) if this label encodes information that is neither too similar nor too different from that which is encoded by a superordinate label, that is, it has moderate specificity; and (b) if it encodes information that differs as much as possible from that which is encoded by horizontally related labels, that is, it has maximal distinctiveness. These findings persist after controlling for other possible determinants of mediators’ categorization decisions, including producers’ claims to labels, products’ typicality, and mediators’ expertise. Funding: M. Piazzai received funding from the Community of Madrid [EPUC3M12, VPRICIT] and the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation [RYC2021-032325-I]. M. Liu received funding from Durham University Business School. Supplemental Material: The e-companion is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2021.15751 .

Value cocreation in online music communities: Empathy and trust as mediators

In recent years the value cocreation-oriented online music community has grown at an astonishing rate. To clarify the relationship between value cocreation and users' continuance intention in an online music community, we added aesthetic value to value cocreation based on service-dominant logic, and explored the chain mediating role of empathy and trust in this model. Using convenience sampling we collected 338 valid questionnaires from people who had used NetEase Cloud online music community within the past 6 months. Structural equation modeling results showed that aesthetic value had no effect on empathy and trust, but the relationships between the other variables in the model showed positive correlations, and empathy and trust had independent and chain mediating roles in this connection. Our findings provide a theoretical basis for the sustainable development of online music communities.

An Analysis of Users Self-Presentation in Different Online Interaction Modes: Taking QQ Music as an Example

With the advancement of media technology, the evolution and development of music media have become more prominent; a single listening tool has evolved into an online interactive community. As media platforms adapted, this online comment section evolved into an entire online music communication community where users could interact online in other ways besides the comment section. So, this paper mainly focuses on the QQ music platform as the primary research object, analysing the interactive behaviour of users in the online music community, and obtaining the effects of different interactive modes on users self-expression. The study utilised discourse analysis and data analysis to analyse users self-presentations in online community interactions and to understand their behaviour in different modules. According to research, online social interactions and community development have a significant impact on listeners behaviors. They can guide the development of creative design strategies for digital media, such as music, movies, and video games. It also showed that commenting interactions and fan group interactions in online music communities are the most emotionally engaging modules for users, and that users in the comment section are better at sharing themselves and interacting with each other.

New Paradigm of Music Listening: Hearing Protection Perceptions and Treatment Decision-Making Among Music Venue Attendees.

Investigate the prevalence of hearing protection (HP) use and behavioral motivations and barriers among adults attending music venues. Cross-sectional online survey study. Noise exposure levels at popular social music venues often exceed national guidelines. Surveys were distributed on online music communities. Respondents (n = 2352) were asked about demographics, HP use at music venues, knowledge about noise exposure impact, and perceptions of HP use. Data were characterized through descriptive statistics. Multivariable regression analysis explored differences in knowledge and perception between HP users and nonusers. In this cohort (mean age 29 ± 7 years, 61% male), HP users were significantly more aware of the impact of music venues on hearing (P < .01), believed their hearing ability had decreased after attending music venues (P < 0.01), and believed HP could protect from hearing loss (P < .01) than non-HP users. HP nonusers most frequently cited never considering HP (14.45%) and apathy about it affecting music quality (12.71%). Common sources of HP information were recommended by a friend/peer. Multivariable regression analysis accounting for demographics, medical history, and attendance characteristics found belief that HP use at music venues could protect from hearing loss (β = 0.64, 95% confidence interval [CI] = [0.49-0.78]) and HP use (β = 1.73, 95% CI = [1.47-1.98]) were significantly associated with increased subjective enjoyment while wearing HP. HP users and nonusers have significantly different perceptions of HP use and its impact. Our findings have implications for understanding motivations and barriers related to HP use and developing strategies to promote HP use at music venues.

Music for Mental Health: An Autoethnography of the Rory Gallagher Instagram Fan Community

Since the outbreak of COVID-19, there has been a major increase in anxiety and depression. For many, online music fandoms have offered an important platform to combat loneliness and aid well-being. In this study, I use autoethnography, supported by psychosocial theory on recovery and sociological theory on music fandoms, to track my personal journey of recovery (2020–2022) from a mental health crisis through the support of the Rory Gallagher Instagram fan community. Specifically, I investigate how the community acts as a positive support mechanism for well-being, how my relationship with Rory and his music has changed since joining the community, and how knowledge of Rory’s own personal struggles, coupled with my own experiences, have empowered me to become a mental health advocate. Overall, the study brings attention to the importance of online music communities as informal, holistic regulating agents for mental health conditions and offers alternative ways for health services to approach mental health care.

The Effect of Sense of Community on Users' Continuance of Online Music Communities

Due to the intense competition, retaining users and facilitating their continuance are crucial to the success of online music communities. The purpose of this research is to examine the effect of sense of community on users' continuance intention of online music communities. Structural equation modeling was adopted to conduct data analysis. The results indicated that social support and flow experience have significant effects on sense of community, which further affects continuance intention. The main limitation is that the results need to be generalized to other countries that had developed online music communities. This research disclosed the mechanism underlying users' continuance in online music communities, which represent an emerging application.

How do users’ feedback influence creators’ contributions: an empirical study of an online music community

ABSTRACT This paper examines creators’ contributions and the incentive effects of users’ feedback, including upvoting, sharing, commenting, following, viewing comments, and clicking on the creators’ homepage. We build a negative binomial and ordinary least squares (OLS) regression model using data from a Chinese music streaming company NetEase Cloud Music. Results show that creators’ number of content contributions is positively affected by the number of users’ commenting, viewing comments, sharing, and clicking on homepage behaviors. On the other hand, users’ upvotes and sharing behaviors can significantly influence the quality of content published by creators. Moreover, we find that the intensity level of creators has moderate effects on such influence. These findings help the researchers better understand creators’ behaviors and community managers to build user-generated content (UGC) communities.

Musical preference in an online music community in China

Musical preference in an online music community in China

Music in Quarantine: Connections Between Changes in Lifestyle, Psychological States, and Musical Behaviors During COVID-19 Pandemic.

Music is not only the art of organized sound but also a compound of social interaction among people, built upon social and environmental foundations. Since the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak, containment measures such as shelter-in-place, lockdown, social distancing, and self-quarantine have severely impacted the foundation of human society, resulting in a drastic change in our everyday experience. In this paper, the relationships between musical behavior, lifestyle, and psychological states during the shelter-in-place period of the COVID-19 pandemic are investigated. An online survey on musical experience, lifestyle changes, stress level, musical behaviors, media usage, and environmental sound perception was conducted. The survey was conducted in early June 2020. Responses from 620 people in 24 countries were collected, with the large proportion of the responses coming from the U.S. (55.5%) and India (21.4%). Structural equation modeling (SEM) analysis revealed causal relationships between lifestyle, stress, and music behaviors. Elements such as stress-level change, work risk, and staying home contribute to changes in musical experiences, such as moderating emotion with music, feeling emotional with music, and being more attentive to music. Stress-level change was correlated with work risk and income change, and people who started living with others due to the outbreak, especially with their children, indicated less change in stress level. People with more stress-level change tended to use music more purposefully for their mental well-being, such as to moderate emotions, to influence mood, and to relax. In addition, people with more stress-level change tend to be more annoyed by neighbors' noise. Housing type was not directly associated with annoyance; however, attention to environmental sounds decreased when the housing type was smaller. Attention to environmental and musical sounds and the emotional responses to them are highly inter-correlated. Multi-group SEM based on musicians showed that the causal relationship structure for professional musicians differs from that of less-experienced musicians. For professional musicians, staying at home was the only component that caused all musical behavior changes; stress did not cause musical behavior changes. Regarding Internet use, listening to music via YouTube and streaming was preferred over TV and radio, especially among less-experienced musicians, while participation in the online music community was preferred by more advanced musicians. This work suggests that social, environmental, and personal factors and limitations influence the changes in our musical behavior, perception of sonic experience, and emotional recognition, and that people actively accommodated the unusual pandemic situations using music and Internet technologies.

Standing in/out

As the first country to experience the outbreak of COVID-19, China’s music industry reacted quickly to the change of the musical context. On 10 March 2020, China’s biggest music company Tencent Music Entertainment Group announced the launch of its music livestreaming concert brand—TME Live. It is understood that through its online live concerts, TME Live uses multi-scenario, innovative performance and digital audio-visual technology to create a panoramic environment for online musical performances, through which TME Live connects musicians and communities of fans. Through this model, Tencent Music Entertainment Group provides musicians with a full range of services, including customized performance styles and an immersive performing experience. Without the impact of Western dominated social media, China’s online music streaming platforms have developed their own biopolitical logics and characteristics in building up online music community and data connectivity. With the case study of TME Live, this article sets out to investigate how China’s major online music streaming platform survives, transforms and adapts in light of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Original Music Album Diffusion Sustainability in Social Network-Based Communities: A Network Embedded Perspective

An original music album is a collection of music created by an online musician, and is a special form of User Generated Content. This paper aims to identify the factors that drive original music album diffusion in online music community. Based on information acceptance theory and social networking, this study constructed a diffusion model of original music albums. To empirically test the theoretically driven hypotheses, the study uses two-stage data from albums and musicians from NetEase Music, one of the most popular online entertainment communities in China. The findings suggested that album created days, musician network degree, album subscription quantity, and album forward quantity had significant positive effects on diffusion sustainability. Musician network embedding had a significant positive effect on diffusion sustainability. There was an inverted u-shaped relationship between album music quantity and diffusion sustainability.

Investigating Crowd Creativity in Online Music Communities

Crowd creativity is typically associated with peer-production communities focusing on artistic products like animations, video games, and music, but less frequently to Open Source Software (OSS), despite the fact that also developers must be creative to come up with new solutions to their technical challenges. In this paper, we conduct a study to further the understanding of which factors from prior work in both OSS and art communities are predictive of successful collaboration - defined as reuse of previous songs - in three different songwriting communities, namely Songtree, Splice, and ccMixter. The main findings from this study confirm that the success of collaborations is associated with high community status of recognizable authors and low degree of derivativity of songs.

Popularity or Proximity: Characterizing the Nature of Social Influence in an Online Music Community

We study social influence in an online music community. In this community, users can listen to and “favorite” (or like) songs and follow the favoriting behavior of their social network friends—and the community as a whole. From an individual user’s perspective, two types of information on peer consumption are salient for each song: total number of favorites by the community as a whole and favoriting by their social network friends. Correspondingly, we study two types of social influence: popularity influence, driven by the total number of favorites from the community as a whole, and proximity influence, due to the favoriting behavior of immediate social network friends. Our quasi-experimental research design applies a variety of empirical methods to highly granular data from an online music community. Our analysis finds robust evidence of both popularity and proximity influence. Furthermore, popularity influence is more important for narrow-appeal music compared to broad-appeal music. Finally, the two types of influence are substitutes for one another, and proximity influence, when available, dominates the effect of popularity influence. We discuss implications for design and marketing strategies for online communities, such as the one studied in this paper.

Replicants, imposters and the real deal: Issues of non-use and technology resistance in vintage and software instruments

This paper explores non-use and technology resistance among musicians and enthusiasts devoted to analog synthesizers (particularly vintage synthesizers from the 1970s), and the recent influx of software simulations that often elicit critical and negative reactions among this group of devotees. Drawing on a combination of assemblage theory and affect theory this paper presents a case study of a prominent online music community and asks: What does this particular instance of technological resistance reveal about the social construction of technology and the on-going emotional and material negotiations that constitute digital and analog experiences? Results show that the possession or appreciation of analog synthesizers and the rejection of their digital counterparts is less about composing music or playing with others and more about a solitary activity that is deeply emotional, experiential and carefully untainted by the impurity of digital processing and equipment.

Musical Identity Online : A 'Netnographic' Perspective of Online Communities

Today`s technology enables consumers to trade millions of dollars, conduct online banking, access entertainment, and do countless other activities at the click of a button. Online social networks (OSN) have become a cultural phenomenon that allows for individualistic consumerism. Consumers are increasingly utilizing OSN to share ideas, build communities, and contact fellow consumers who are similar to themselves. The relevance of online communities to the music is immense especially because musicians are now using social media to build global audiences. Not only is information about music and performance disseminated online, but musical commodities are sold and traded online. Online music communities allow consumers to elect and create new identities online through the purchase of subcultural commodities. Given the growing economic importance of online music communities it is important to get a holistic view of subcultural communities online. This study utilized content analysis of online music community websites using the Netnography methodology as developed by Kozinet for data collection to analyze consumers` purchasing and consumption behavior of subcultural commodities online as related to the formation of subcultural identities. Findings showed that subcultural items are predominantly purchased online, especially digital music, and there is a need for more custom craft items. The authors presented a new conceptual taxonomy of online subcultural consumer classifications based on online behavior patterns.

“The Next Level”: Investigating teaching and learning within an Irish traditional music online community

Online music communities offer a new context and culture for musical participation globally. This article, employing a socio-cultural theoretical lens, examines how the Online Academy of Irish Music (OAIM) functions as a teaching and learning online community for Irish traditional music. Findings from qualitative case study research present observations of practice from the OAIM website, forums, video tutorials, and Facebook posts over a 9-month period. In addition to these collective insights, findings from participant logs and interviews with the tutors offer individual insights into the online case study. Questions are posed regarding the pedagogy of e-learning, the development of a “shared practice” and the influence of roles and relationships within the community. The online medium of interaction raises important issues for the growing technological culture of music teaching and learning and the study seeks to understand this new context for musical participation.

Online Music Community System based on SNM

Currently, the community structure algorithms proposed by most scholars are contraposing un-weighted network, while there still lacks research on the discovery of weighted network community. In un-weighted networks, the relation between the nodes is simplified as two states, which will neglect too much valuable information. To construct more actual structure of mined community, a novel discovery algorithm for weighted network community is put forward. The social network technology is implemented to a music forum. It can find out the social relation and interactive behavior of users in the music forum, to help the music resource to find suitable consumers. The music community system using social network mining is based on extracted replying and quoting information of users. For the user social network and topic social network of forum, two social network mining methods are proposed: One is applied to the user social network mining, which can find out the use groups who have similar interest in network; The other is applied to the topic social network mining, based on merging idea of weighted network community, and it can find out the similar groups of hot topics. Finally the mining process of network relationship in a certain music forum is described in detail as an example and it has verified the effectiveness of mining results.

User-generated content, YouTube and participatory culture on the Web: music learning and teaching in two contrasting online communities

In this paper, I draw on seminal literature from new media researchers to frame the broader implications that user-generated content (UGC), YouTube, and participatory culture have for music learning and teaching in online communities; to illustrate, I use examples from two contrasting online music communities, the Online Academy of Irish Traditional Music (OAIM, www.owim.ie) and the Banjo Hangout (www.banjohangout.org). The different ways people employ UGC such as YouTube videos for music learning and teaching in online participatory communities has significant implications for music learning and teaching in on and offline contexts.

Remix: Practice, Context, Culture

Remix: Practice, Context, Culture