First-mover advantage in music

Abstract

Explaining the mechanisms of success and failure in culture remains an important challenge. In this paper we suggest that a first-mover advantage hypothesis, borrowed from economics, can explain the success in cultural industries such as music. The hypothesis claims that companies that enter a new market niche early on become more successful. In music, a genre is analogous to a niche, and early representatives of a genre may be considered first movers. To test whether early representatives of music genres are indeed more successful, we study ten new music genres using large data on musical success collected by the Spotify streaming service. Our findings support the hypothesis that successful artists may owe their popularity to innovativeness in new artistic niches.

Computational lexical analysis of Flamenco genres

“…These efforts encompass a broad range of activities, from the development of cultural platforms and databases [1][2][3][4][5][6] to the application of social signal processing to oral history collections [7]. Additionally, there have been explorations into artistic folklore studies, such as various approaches for analyzing dance movements [8][9][10], analysis of musical metrics of contemporary western popular music through the decades [11,12], and advancements in music innovation studies [13]. Our research aims to contribute to the understanding of the lyrics of Flamenco, a musical tradition deeply rooted in culture but scarcely studied with quantitative methods.…”