An in-depth Analysis of Occasional and Recurring Collaborations in Online Music Co-creation

TL;DR

This study investigates the patterns and factors influencing recurring collaborations in online music co-creation communities, revealing distinct behaviors and motivations in occasional versus recurring overdubbing collaborations.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel frequent pattern mining approach to identify recurring musician collaborations and analyzes their unique characteristics in an online community.

Findings

Recurring collaborations involve similar reputation members.

Fresh, less mature songs are more frequently overdubbed.

Messaging and invitations are key in recurring collaborations.

Abstract

The success of online creative communities depends on the will of participants to create and derive content in a collaborative environment. Despite their growing popularity, the factors that lead to remixing existing content in online creative communities are not entirely understood. In this paper, we focus on overdubbing, that is, a dyadic collaboration where one author mixes one new track with an audio recording previously uploaded by another. We study musicians who collaborate regularly, that is, frequently overdub each other's songs. Building on frequent pattern mining techniques, we develop an approach to seek instances of such recurring collaborations in the Songtree community. We identify 43 instances involving two or three members with a similar reputation in the community. Our findings highlight common and different remix factors in occasional and recurring collaborations. Specifically, fresh and less mature songs are generally overdubbed more; instead, exchanging messages and invitations to collaborate are significant factors only for songs generated through recurring collaborations whereas author reputation (ranking) and applying metadata tags to songs have a positive effect only in occasional collaborations.