Collaboration Success Factors in an Online Music Community

TL;DR

This paper investigates the factors influencing successful creative collaboration in an online music community, highlighting the roles of recent activity, community reactions, and author reputation in fostering collaborative songwriting.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed analysis of collaboration success factors in an online music community, focusing on overdubbing behavior and author influence.

Findings

Recent songs are more likely to be overdubbed.

Songs with many reactions attract more collaboration.

High-status authors tend to produce influential songs.

Abstract

Online communities have been able to develop large, open-source software (OSS) projects like Linux and Firefox throughout the successful collaborations carried out by their members over the Internet. However, online communities also involve creative arts domains such as animation, video games, and music. Despite their growing popularity, the factors that lead to successful collaborations in these communities are not entirely understood. In this paper, we present a study on creative collaboration in a music community where authors write songs together by 'overdubbing,' that is, by mixing a new track with an existing audio recording. We analyzed the relationship between song- and author-related measures and the likelihood of a song being overdubbed. We found that recent songs, as well as songs with many reactions, are more likely to be overdubbed; authors with a high status in the community and a recognizable identity write songs that the community tends to build upon.