Come Together, Right Now? An Empirical Study of Collaborations in the Music Industry

Bibliographic Data

ID23213252
AuthorsAbhishek Deshmane (0000-0002-2567-8518, IESE Business School, University of Navarra, 08034 Barcelona, Spain), Víctor Martínez-De-Albéniz (0000-0001-8391-2205, IESE Business School, University of Navarra, 08034 Barcelona, Spain)
Year2023
Volume69
Issue12
Pages7217-7235
Publication date2023-12-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueManagement Science (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0025-1909 • E-ISSN: 1526-5501
PublisherInstitute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1287/mnsc.2023.4743
OpenAlexW4361272352
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited72

Artist collaborations in music have been on the rise, and they tend to produce commercially and critically successful songs. We seek to uncover the effect of these collaborative projects on career trajectories and identify the factors that lift an artist’s profile in the short and long term. We develop a theory of collaboration based on the transfer of capital between the collaborating artists that facilitates spillovers across time. To validate the theory, we use weekly radio plays of individual songs across 25 European countries between the years 2011 to 2018, together with a multiattribute Spotify data set of songs and Hofstede’s cultural dimensions in relation to artist origins. We create pairs of similar artists who released a collaboration and a solo song in the same week and measure the impact of collaborations based on the difference-in-differences methodology. We find that releasing a collaboration song, in comparison with a solo song, increases the number of plays of an artist in the future by +4.6%. This lift can be broken down into +9.6% for the current song and +7.7% for subsequently released songs, whereas past songs are unaffected. The effect is moderated by the difference in economic, social, and cultural capitals and is significantly larger when one’s partner has higher economic and social capital or is highly dissimilar along the cultural dimension. Our theoretical and empirical exploration of such strategic alliances uncovers several underlying mechanisms at play in the success of these pairings and can serve as the basis for future work targeted at prescriptive contributions. This paper was accepted by David Simchi-Levi, operations management. Funding: The research was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación) [Grant Ref. PID2020-116135GB-I00/AEI/10.13039/501100011033]. Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.4743 .

Art · Business · Cultural capital · Dimension (graph theory) · Empirical evidence · Empirical research · Hofstede's cultural dimensions theory · Lift (data mining) · Music education · Music industry · Set (abstract data type) · Social capital · Social science · Sociology · Visual arts · Computer Science · Cultural Industries and Urban Development · Digital Marketing and Social Media · Marketing · Open Source Software Innovations

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