The antecedents of remix

Abstract

Reuse of the works of others has become common practice on the Internet and has formed the basis for collaboration in some online communities. However, some works are reused much more frequently than others. In this article we build a quantitative model that explains which factors are most salient in determining the likelihood that an author's work will be reused. Controlling for common factors, such as the work's popularity, we show that the probability of reuse depends on (a) the degree of derivativity of the work in question, (b) the specific ways in which it derives meaning from other works (intertextuality), (c) the audience's preferential attachment to authors of high fecundity, and (d) the author's social embeddedness in networks of reuse. We use trace data from an online community that was built for the purpose of demonstrating the ability of open sharing and reuse to spur collaboration and innovation in music. Although our model is designed for broad applicability, we explain that the size and direction of the effects reported in this paper may vary, when reuse is performed with other media or for different purposes.

Investigating Crowd Creativity in Online Music Communities

“…Regarding author-related hypotheses, prior research on both OSS (e.g., [28]) and arts communities (e.g., [6,16]) highlighted that authors' prominence and their social embeddedness are antecedents of success. Hence, we expect that content generated by community members with a high status is reused more often.…”

“…Similar findings are reported by Settles and Dow [22] who analyzed the music community of FAWM and found that the prior exchange of direct messages between musicians is the factor that contributes the most to the successful completion of their collaborations. Hill and Monroy-Hernández [13] performed a study on the success of video animations in Scratch and found that the likelihood of engendering derivative works is related to cumulativeness (i.e., remixes themselves are reused more than de novo content), which is in direct contrast with the finding by Cheliotis et al [6] on the degree of derivativity (i.e., the 'newer' the content, the higher the likelihood of remix). The contrasting findings from these two works provide additional motivation to further study the antecedents of artifact reuse in collaborative songwriting communities.…”

“…Albeit both creators and end-users are necessary for the survival of online creative communities, the presence of the latter is consequential to the availability of shared artifacts. Accordingly, hereinafter, a successful collaboration in online arts communities is intended in terms of artifact reuse, that is, the generation of derivative content through the reworking and recombination of existing contributions from other members [6,13,20].…”

“…In their study on the antecedents of reuse in the ccMixter music community, Cheliotis et al [6] found evidence that being known to other members (i.e., social embeddedness) and active (i.e., fecundity) increase the likelihood of songs being remixed (i.e., reused, in case of audio/video products). Stanko [26] investigated why some 3D-printable objects in the Thingiverse creative community are more successful than others and found that their degree of generativity is proportional to the degree of interaction of the authors with other community members.…”

Copy, Transform, Combine: Exploring the Remix as a Form of Innovation

“…Driven by the advent of open platforms and communities on the internet, it has only been in recent years that the concept of innovation through recombination has gained further attention (Lessig, 2008;Khatib et al, 2011;Tuite and Smith, 2012;Cheliotis et al, 2014;Sapsed and Tschang, 2014;Oehlberg et al, 2015;Dasgupta et al, 2016;Stanko, 2016). Online platforms with openly licensed content and data make it increasingly easy to share and access a wide range of usergenerated ideas (Lee et al, 2010;Kane and Ransbotham, 2012;Leonardi, 2014;Payton, 2016).…”