It takes two, baby! Feature artist collaborations and streaming demand for music
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It takes two, baby! Feature artist collaborations and streaming demand for music Jordi McKenzie1 · Paul Crosby1 · Liam J. A. Lenten2 Received: 4 May 2020 / Accepted: 21 September 2020 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Over the last 30 years, there has been an increasing tendency for artists to collaborate with ‘feature’ artists on one-off song projects. Although there might be purely artistic reasons for such collaborations, it is not clear a priori if there are also economic returns in terms of increased demand. Furthermore, if there is evidence of increased demand, the natural question becomes whether the mechanism is through a ‘quality’ or ‘promotion’ channel, or a combination thereof. Using weekly US Spotify streaming data from 2017–2018, we investigate these questions. We exploit the fact that many artists in our sample sometimes work alone and sometimes work with feature artists. Additionally, we also exploit the fact that many artists work with multiple features artists, which allows us to examine how (observed) feature artist characteristics affect demand. We find that songs featuring other artists generally outperform songs without feature artists, although there are a number of caveats with respect to the characteristics of the artists involved. Although we do not entirely rule out a quality effect, we conjecture a promotion effect is the primary channel explaining our main result. Keywords Feature artist · Collaboration · Music JEL Classification L82 · Z10 “Cross-marketing is an age-old concept. As far back as Aerosmith and Run-D.M.C. or even before, there was the idea of, we’ll get some of your fans, you get some of our fans.” Ricky Reed (artist, writer and producer), Nov. 30, 2017.
* Jordi McKenzie [email protected] 1
Department of Economics, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia
2
Melbourne, Australia
13
Vol.:(0123456789)
Journal of Cultural Economics
1 Introduction Collaboration is a pervasive feature of modern production observed across a wide variety of industries such as retail, manufacturing, R&D, and even academic research. It is also often a feature of creative production. In this study, we examine such a setting with respect to contemporary music, where artists collaborate with other artists on individual song projects. The practice of ‘featuring’ other artists has become increasingly common in recent years, which raises a variety of questions about the nature and benefits of such collaborations. From one point of view, the involvement of feature artists in recorded music can be understood as a collaborative production process, where output becomes a function of combined worker inputs. Economic justifications for collaboration typically center around the notions of skill complementarities and productive interactions. Collaborations of this nature encourage an efficient division of labor by exploiting relative comparative advantages to increase the variety and quality of the output produced (Büyükboyacı and Robbett 2017; La
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