From Compact Discs to Streaming: A Comparison of Eras within the Brazilian Market

Abstract

The music industry has undergone many changes in the last few decades, notably since vinyl, cassettes and compact discs faded away as streaming platforms took the world by storm. This Digital evolution has made huge volumes of data about music consumption available. Based on such data, we perform cross-era comparisons between Physical and Digital media within the music market in Brazil. First, we build artists' success time series to detect and characterize hot streak periods, defined as high-impact bursts that occur in sequence, in both eras. Then, we identify groups of artists with distinct success levels by applying a cluster analysis based on hot streaks' features. We find the same clusters for both Physical and Digital eras: Spike Hit Artists, Big Hit Artists, and Top Hit Artists. Our results reveal significant changes in the music industry dynamics over the years by identifying the core of each era.

From Exploration to Exploitation: Understanding the Evolution of Music Careers through a Data-driven Approach

“…These most successful periods are known as Hot Streaks: a specific period during which an individual's performance is substantially better than their typical performance [Liu et al 2018]. Further, Seufitelli et al (2022) have already shown that it is possible to identify the presence of success above the normal in the musical context. Regarding data, the music industry is a unique source of complex perspectives.…”

Analyses of Musical Success based on Time, Genre and Collaboration

“…• Study on collaboration profiles in success-based genre networks [Oliveira et al 2020b] (Best Paper Presentation Award at ISMIR 2020); • Application of the hot streak methodology in the US and Brazil [Barbosa et al 2021, Seufitelli et al 2022] (Best Paper Award at SBCM 2021); • MUHSIC and MUHSIC-BR, datasets with temporal information on musical success [Oliveira et al 2021a, Oliveira et al 2021b]; • MGD, a dataset with genre success information [Oliveira et al 2020c]; • Analyses on patterns in hit songs .…”