Investigating Crowd Creativity in Online Music Communities

TL;DR

This study explores how community status and song originality influence successful collaboration in online music communities, revealing that high-status authors and less derivative songs foster more reuse and collaboration.

Contribution

It provides new insights into factors predicting successful collaboration in online music communities, bridging research from OSS and art communities.

Findings

High community status of authors correlates with more successful reuse.

Lower derivativity of songs predicts higher likelihood of collaboration.

Community dynamics influence creative success in online music platforms.

Abstract

Crowd creativity is typically associated with peer-production communities focusing on artistic products like animations, video games, and music, but less frequently to Open Source Software (OSS), despite the fact that also developers must be creative to come up with new solutions to their technical challenges. In this paper, we conduct a study to further the understanding of which factors from prior work in both OSS and art communities are predictive of successful collaboration - defined as reuse of previous songs - in three different songwriting communities, namely Songtree, Splice, and ccMixter. The main findings from this study confirm that the success of collaborations is associated with high community status of recognizable authors and low degree of derivativity of songs.