by Boris Gunst [winner of the 2019 IASPM VNPF Popular Music Thesis Prize [Master’s]
Is it possible to predict the success of a song before release? And how does the popularity of artists influence the attention for new music by the audience?
As an electronic music producer, during my master Cultural Economics and Entrepreneurship, these were questions that caught my curiosity. More than based on academic knowledge, I was mainly driven by a hope that electronic music culture and its artists may benefit from online communities in which members upload recordings of unreleased music in order to identify songs. My thesis focusses on the Facebook-community Raad de Plaat (RdP) which had 38,385 members at the time of my research and currently increased to 48,900 members. To illustrate the size of this community, the biggest festivals in the Netherlands attract 35,000 visitors. Based on data generated in RdP, the research question of my thesis is to what extent pre-release attention for songs and the popularity of the artist generated in online communities can be an indicator for success of songs after release.
The reaction of musicians and academics to my research is often both curious and sceptical: “music is about feelings, not about numbers”, “the implications of internet for independency of music producers may be overestimated” or “it seems like a kind of music forecasting”. However, the aim of this research is not to engage in some sort of sectoral forecasting. Rather it explores what elements of symbolic capital, instead of economic capital, can be seen as deterministic for the structure and concentration of the current music industry. Symbolic capital denotes distinctions such as reputation of and attention for artists. In this way it represents the artist’s ‘potential’.
We know that before a song is released, it is difficult to estimate whether the audience will appreciate it. As a result, record labels establish production-divisions to detect trends and adapt to uncertainty in the market. The people doing this work can be seen as gatekeepers for the market. Gatekeepers take a central role in the music industry because they decide whether the value of music and the potential of artists is high enough to cover investment. Subsequently record labels often choose to sign artists that already have proven to be successful. This results in market concentration.
To answer the research question, I based the concept of attention for unreleased songs on the number of RdP-likes and RdP-comments. The popularity of the artist is represented by the artist’s number of Facebook-page likes. Success on Spotify is defined as number of plays per day, and on Beatport as a songs peak position and number of days in the charts. By using a quantitative content analysis, my research showed that just the attention for unreleased songs in RdP can significantly predict plays per day on Spotify after release to some extent. When also taking the popularity of the artist into account, a majority of the success of songs can be predicted before release. The popularity of the artist on Facebook, is a significant predictor for success on Beatport and Spotify in all models.
When online communities enable the audience to collectively value songs before release, their practice is similar to the practice of gatekeepers and this may have implications for the organization and structure of the music industry. In general, the fact that this research could take place, based on data generated by the audience, shows that online communities make it possible to establish a better understanding of mechanisms and preferences within cultures. Furthermore, it enables artists to directly interact with large audiences online and may decrease dependency on traditional gatekeepers in the music industry.
The complete thesis is accessible here.
Contact: borisgunst@epitone.nl
LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/boris-gunst-87643b174/
Personal website: www.borisgunst.com
Boris Gunst
Having worked in both the cultural sector and the field of commercial media, Boris Gunst became increasingly interested in research and theories about the interface between the cultural and the economic world. As electronic music producer, during his master Cultural Economics and Entrepreneurship at Erasmus University Rotterdam, Boris developed a thorough understanding regarding the creation of value in the music industry. Currently, he is in the process of writing an article on the topic of his thesis and working as coordinator for Stichting Beeldende Kunst (Visual Arts Foundation).