Music has tremendous cultural and commercial significance for people the world over. It is one of the oldest human inventions and is among the most popular consumption activities on the planet. The music industry is also of great economic importance with 19 billion dollars in revenue worldwide in 2019. Despite music’s importance and significance, little work has been devoted to understanding what makes some types of music more popular than others or on the implications of success on artists’ subsequent productivity. Earlier studies have investigated psychological and economic aspects of music, but marketing as a field has devoted little attention to understanding the drivers of musical success and the dynamics of the music industry. In this dissertation, I leverage modern Bayesian non-parametric approaches, machine learning, and novel data to study the dynamic drivers of musical success and the implications of that success. The dissertation is composed of two essays devoted to investigating these complementary questions. In the first essay, I examine the dynamics of success of albums over the last fifty years. I then leverage the results to construct well-balanced playlists that will appeal to different generations of music listeners. My empirical investigation is based on a novel dataset I collected from diverse online sources. The dataset is comprised of albums' movements up and down Billboard magazine’s annual Top 200 lists of albums, marketing and standard descriptors of the albums such as genre and artist popularity, acoustic descriptors of the albums' tracks such as the songs’ acoustic fingerprints, and user-generated tags describing the albums’ and songs’ consumption context and the experience perceived by listeners. I develop a novel Bayesian non-parametric model that fuses the diverse data modalities and predicts the dynamic patterns of musical success over the years. The model generates results regarding how musical acoustic qualities and genres have waxed and waned in popularity over time. It also uses tags listeners generate online to uncover themes that categorize albums in terms of sub-genres, consumption contexts, emotions, evocation of nostalgia, and other aspects of the musical experience. The model yields insightful results about the evolution of album success in the music industry. These insights are relevant to artists and music professionals who recommend albums, design new releases, and construct well-balanced playlists aimed at various generations of listeners. The second essay is devoted to quantifying the effects of winning the Grammy for Best New Artist on artists’ productivity and musical variety. The causal identification strategy is based on comparing subsequent outcomes in terms of both productivity and diversification of musical styles and elements winners of and contenders for the award. This strategy allows the model to control for ability bias and improves confidence in the estimated causal effects. The study is based on a dataset I collected from diverse online sources that spans the entire history of the Best New Artist award and contains integral album discographies of the nominees, most of their released songs, and their acoustic descriptors. I use a two-way fixed effects approach to measure the causal effect of the award and incorporate heterogeneity in the treatment effects. The results yield interesting insights into positive effects of the award on productivity. Interestingly, my investigation also reveals that the effects of winning the award are heterogeneous in terms of gender and that male solo singers benefit more than female solo singers and groups, male groups, and mixed-gender groups. In contrast, winning the award does not affect artistic variety on average, though winners tend to explore new artistic dimensions that are congruent with their musical specialties than contenders do.

This dissertation traces the tensions surrounding indie music production in Santiago, Chile and Sao Paulo, Brazil. I conducted several years of ethnographic research on locally situated, yet transnationally interpolated, musical production, circulation and listening practices in Santiago and Sao Paulo. I open by detailing the expansion of the indie touring market from the global north into both cities, theorizing the enlistment of affect as a neoliberal technique for producing monetary value. The next chapter considers spaces for musical association as forms of infrastructure that both emerge from and themselves help constitute musical-social networks in Santiago. I follow by showing how the history of Brazilian individuals' engagement with particular sets of indie sounds from the global north bear upon the contemporary formation of infrastructures of social relations, musical aesthetics, and places for musical and social association. Finally, I detail how the tensions between the construction of audience, value, aesthetics and circulation arising from new production structures manifest in the politics of a new type of Brazilian institution called Fora do Eixo. Here, I inspect the logics of aesthetic valuation in building structures for music production within a complex state-private nexus of cultural funding in Brazil. As a whole, this dissertation explores the political struggles emerging as actors seek to establish new structures for participating in live shows and for playing music as both a creative practice and as an economic activity within emerging forms of communication and cultural circulation made possible by digital media. Each struggle is simultaneously interpolated by the messy articulation of transnationally-produced notions of aesthetics, authentic modes of engagement with music, and moral-ethical ways of organizing music production, circulation and remuneration as a social practice. The dissertation thus highlights the way new media and economic logics build upon and clash with historical practices of production, evaluation of aesthetics, and regimes for mediating the artistic, the economic, and the social.

This thesis seeks to gain a holistic understanding of consumption issues in the popular music market, such that it needs to account for the influence of 1) technological factors, 2) institutional factors, 3) cultural factors, and 4) an ontological aspect; as these are identified to be the most prominent aspects in the literature on the market. While there is a bourgeoning literature on the market, there has been little formal attempt to link such issues in a comprehensive fashion. The methodology applied provides a critique of the literature on specific consumption theories which have apparent pertinence to the music market. Each of the sociological, psychological, and economic theories (neoclassical and radical) is found to be too generalized to provide such an understanding, in that many issues concerning the music market would need to be eschewed if these theories were to be applied in an orthodox fashion. Moreover, the theories tend to point towards each other for the possibility of a credible, holistic consumption analysis. The most useful and all-encompassing consumption theory reviewed is the systems of provision approach advanced by Fine and Leopold (1993), in that the approach aims to be sensitive to the difference between commodities in terms of the economic and social processes and structures by which they become commodities, and thus it can allow one to consider adequately the four requirements identified above for a holistic understanding of the market. This approach is then applied to the western music market with the aim of 1) testing the approach identified, and 2) making a specific comment of the market. The market is found to be characterized historically by three distinct periods, each with distinct systems of provision (i.e. each with the four factors identified above relating to each other in a certain manner). It is proposed that preference formations in the final period identified have been institutionalized to a large extent, and there is a low probability of change occurring. The systems of provision approach is argued to be beneficial in highlighting which aspects of the existing consumption theories are relevant to the market at a point in time, and to what extent. Thus the richness of the approach stems from its ability to gain a holistic understanding, and to identify theoretical discussion topics, such as those concerning political economy. The approach is then applied to the South African music market, using the same historical methodology, in conjunction with current empirical evidence from the market. Doing this allows one to test the generality of the systems of provision approach, and to attempt to make a comment on the South African market. The techniques for obtaining empirical evidence are argued to be sound, but resource constraints prevented the research from reflecting a holistic view of the market. Nonetheless, a rich perspective is provided from interviews with prominent agents in the market, and thus the chapter is argued to provide the beginning of an understanding of preference formations in the South African music market, in which little research has been conducted (Stella, 2005).

This dissertation is an ethnography centered around two bands based in Guangzhou and their relationships with one of China’s largest record companies. Bridging ethnomusicology, popular music studies, cultural geography, media studies, vocal anthropology, and the anthropology of infrastructure, it examines emergent forms of musical creativity and modes of circulation as they relate to shifts in concepts of self, space, publics, and state instigated by China’s political and economic reforms. Chapter One discusses a long history of state-sponsored cartographic musical anthologies, as well as Confucian and Maoist ways of understanding the relationships between place, person, and music. These discussions provide a context for understanding contemporary musical cosmopolitanisms that both build upon and disrupt these histories; they also provoke a rethinking of ethnomusicological and related linguistic theorizations about music, place, and subjectivity. Through biographies of seven musicians working in present-day Guangzhou, Chapter Two outlines a concept of “musical subjectivity” that looks to the intersection of personal histories, national histories, and creativity as a means of exploring the role of individual agency and expressive culture in broader cultural shifts. Chapter Three focuses on the intertwining of actual corporeal mobilities and vicarious musical mobilities, and explores relationships between circulations of global popular musics, emergent forms of musical creativity, and an evolving geography of contemporary China. Chapter Four extends these concerns to a discussion of media systems in China, and outlines an approach to “sonic infrastructures” that puts sound studies in dialogue with the anthropology of infrastructure in order to understand how evolving modes of musical circulation and the listening practices associated with them are connected to broader economic, political, and cultural spatialities. Finally, Chapter Five examines the intersecting aesthetic and political implications of popular music sung in local languages (fangyan) by focusing on contemporary forms of articulation between music, language, listening, and place. Taken together, these chapters explore musical cosmopolitanisms as knowledge-making processes that are reconfiguring notions of self, state, publics, and space in contemporary China.

The music industry is a market of superstars, that is a market where a relatively small number of people earn enormous amounts of money and dominate the activity in which they engage (Rosen,1981). Theories on the superstars phenomenon suggest that luck (Adler, 1985) or talent (Rosen, 1981) are the driving forces behind success. Thus, the “superstars models” left performers with no “active” role: successful artists are either endowed with an innate talent far above the average or are extremely lucky. However, all musicians (talented or not; lucky or not) take continuously decisions that affect their career. Chapter 1 and 2 of this dissertation analyze in details some of these decisions and their influence on success.<p>Chapter 1, Rock Bands: Matching, Recording & Work Organization,4 investigates the impact of partnerships, matching, and work organization on the success of rock musicians using a unique database of 1,494 albums released between 1970 and 2004. We show that rock bands differ in their work organization because the agreements between the members of band are different. These agreements can be seen as implicit contracts. Drawing on this observation, we develop a model where agents (musicians) with different levels of creativity match (to form a band) and produce a joint output (a song). We show that the way agents match (positively or negatively) is correlated with success and depends on the (in)completeness of contracts. The theoretical results are supported by the data.<p>Chapter 2, Musical Characteristics and Success in Commercial Music, analyzes the relationship between musical characteristics, that can objectively be measured, and different types of success (commercial success, critical success, and success assessed by music lovers). We show that the strength and the direction (positive or negative) of the relationship between success and musical characteristics vary with the measure of success.<p>The third chapter goes in a slightly different direction than the two others as it deals with long term reputation of composers rather than commercial success of pop-rock musicians. Chapter 3, The Formation of the Canons of the Baroque Music, analyzes the reputation of baroque composers over time. The dataset makes it possible to describe the evolution of composers’ reputation and of the baroque canon. The entries in seven important musical dictionaries written between 1790 and 2000 are used to measure reputations. We provide evidence that a consensus exists between musicologists, who often rely on their predecessors’ work.<p><p>References:<p>Adler, M. (1985). Stardom and talent. American Economic Review, 75, 208-211.<p>Rosen, S. (1981). The economics of superstars, American Economic Review, 71, 845–858.<p> / Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished