Come Together, Right Now? An Empirical Study of Collaborations in the Music Industry

Abstract

Artist collaborations in music have been on the rise, which tend to produce commercially
and critically successful songs. We seek to uncover the effect of these collaborative projects on
their career trajectories, and identify the factors that lift an artist's profile in the short and in
the long term. We develop a theory of collaboration based on the transfer of capital between the
collaborating artists which facilitates spillovers across time. To validate the theory, we use weekly
radio plays of individual songs, across 25 European countries, between the years 2011 to 2018,
together with a multi-attribute Spotify dataset of songs, and Hofstede's cultural dimensions in
relation to artist origins. We create pairs of similar artists who released a collaboration and a
solo song in the same week, and measure the impact of collaborations based on the Difference-in-
Differences methodology. We find that releasing a collaboration song, in comparison with a solo
song, increases the number of plays of an artist in the future by +4.6%. This lift can be broken
down into +9.6% for the current song, and of +7.7% for subsequently released songs, while past
songs are unaffected. The effect is moderated by the difference in economic, social, and cultural
capitals, and is significantly larger when one's partner has higher economic and social capitals
or is highly dissimilar along the cultural dimension. Our theoretical and empirical exploration
of such strategic alliances uncovers several underlying mechanisms at play in the success of these
pairings and can serve as the basis for future work targeted at prescriptive contributions.

Keywords: New Product Development, Collaborations, Cultural Production, Music, Status Hierarchies, Complementarities