Stars inside have reached outside: The effects of electronic dance music DJs’ social standing and musical identity on track success

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.