Conference Agenda

Genres are aesthetic and social categories that organise the production and consumption of cultural objects, such as music. Previous research has described genre complexes in music and examined how genre unconventionality relates to the success or failure of musical styles. This paper will extend these approaches by asking how genre complexes influence cultural globalization using a network analytic approach to defining the genre space. We use data from Spotify on the daily top 200 most streamed songs from 68 countries between 2017 and 2021 (about 100,000 songs and 38,000 unique artists). Spotify assigns multiple genre labels to artists; our data include about 3000 unique degree descriptors. To reduce the dimensionality of these genre data, we define a bipartite artist-genre network and community detection methods to identify genre complexes, or clusters. The analysis explores the robustness of this approach to different community detection methods. To determine how genre affects cultural globalization, we define cultural success at the global scale as the number of countries in which a song reaches the top 200 (or alternative thresholds). We estimate zero-inflated negative binomial models of this county count outcome using these network-defined genre complexes as a key predictor. We find that genre complexes substantially explain variation in global cultural success.

### **Abstract**

This study examines the impact of **negative ties**, specifically copyright litigation, on artists' collaboration networks in the music industry. While negative ties, such as lawsuits, are typically associated with reputational damage and social isolation, we argue that they can also serve as catalysts for network reconfiguration and growth. Using a quasi-experimental matched units difference-in-differences (DiD) design, we analyze collaboration patterns of Billboard Hot 100 artists before and after they were sued for copyright infringement. The dataset includes 242 artists (121 sued, 121 matched controls) and 3,400 artist-year observations, with collaboration data sourced via web scraping from MusicBrainz.

Our findings suggest that lawsuits trigger a process of **network repair**, wherein sued artists expand their collaboration networks to counteract the negative repercussions of legal disputes. However, this expansion is not uniform; sued artists are more likely to collaborate with **less experienced** and **differently specialized** alters, who perceive greater benefits and lower risks in such partnerships. These results contribute to the literature on **negative ties** by demonstrating how event-type disruptions interact with state-type ties, influencing both animosity and collaboration. Additionally, this study advances research on creativity by showing how copyright disputes shape artistic collaboration beyond legal consequences. By bridging theories of **negative ties**, network evolution, and creative industries, our findings offer novel insights into the unintended yet strategic responses artists adopt in the face of reputational threats.

This presentation is part of the exploratory research for my doctoral thesis on the international circulation of rap music from Morocco and Egypt, and aims to present the initial findings related to the question of collaborations between rappers and beatmakers and the dynamics of creative innovation in their musical practices

The digital age has profoundly transformed the dynamics of musical production and its processes, especially with the rise of digital production software (Walzer, 2016), and the advent of social media that are reshaping interactions between players in an industry where relational connections play a central role (Budner & Grahl, 2016). These technological tools provide artists and beatmakers with new means to foster creativity and integrate collaborative networks.

The central question in this study is therefore:

How do the dynamics of musical production and the relationships between artists and producers stimulate creative innovation and structure collaborative networks?

This research focuses on the Moroccan rap scene and examines two axes: the relationships and power relations between rappers and beatmakers in the context of their collaborations; and the innovation aspect in these players’ creative practices (particularly through computer-assisted music software). This study seeks to understand how these dimensions influence the evolution of collaborative networks and new forms of musical creation.

The study will be based on interviews with five Moroccan rappers and five beatmakers, an analysis of specific collaboration cases based on these discussions, and a literature review on innovation in the creative field as well as artist-producer relationships.

Information on social networks has been incorporated into music recommendation systems to improve music recommendation quality. The underlying assumption is that social connections between users indicate similar music listening profiles. Existing cultural sociological research supports the notion that one's network patterns correlate with one's taste profiles. However, the questions of to what extent preference similarity relates to social connectedness, and whether social connections broaden users' consumption profiles, are both underexplored. Our work aims at filling these gaps by answering the following research questions. (1) Does music taste similarity correlate with social connectedness? Can we predict users' taste similarity based on their social closeness, and vice-versa? (2) How do music tastes evolve over time and to what extent does the evolution relate to social connections? We address these questions with a quantitative analysis of a large-scale dataset of 17,680 users of Last.fm. The dataset includes following-follower relationships information as well as users' listening events. Our findings will reveal whether social proximity is a reliable predictor of music preference similarity, and whether social networks facilitate or constrain music exploration. These insights on how social networks shape cultural consumption patterns will inform the design of more socially aware music recommendation systems.