In this dissertation I leverage new data from the global music recording industry to study the social foundations of creativity and the relationship between product novelty, gender, and commercial success. In Chapter 1, I investigate how different kinds of social connection influence the creation of novel cultural products. Using data on over 25,000 musical artists and 600,000 songs, I construct a feature-based measure of song novelty and then estimate how musicians’ collaboration networks, category memberships, organizational affiliations, and geographic neighbors affect their propensity to produce novel work. Results suggest that the most significant predictor of future song novelty is membership in a category or genre populated by other creative artists. This and other findings suggest that creativity stems not only from contact with diverse ideas accessed through collaboration, but also from exposure to creative alters with common cultural and organizational ties. In Chapter 2, I use a subsample of the same data to explore the relationship between gender and creative output. I find no mean difference between men and women in terms of the novelty of the songs they produce, but after controlling for the size and gender composition of an artist’s collaboration network, as well as the gender composition of her primary genre, I find that female artists create significantly more distinctive songs than their male counterparts. These results suggest that structural and cultural factors—rather than differences in raw ability—are responsible for gender disparities in creative production. To conclude, in Chapter 3 I unpack the relationship between atypicality and commercial success. Using additional data from Billboard’s Hot 100 charts, I find that a song’s perceived sonic proximity to its peers influences its position on the charts. Contrary to the claim that all popular music sounds the same, I find that songs sounding too much alike—those that are highly typical—are less likely to succeed, while those exhibiting some degree of optimal differentiation are more likely to rise to the top of the charts.

Creator

• Mauskapf, Michael Gerard

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-sq22-be72

Subject

• Management
• Sociology
• Organization theory

Language

• en

Alternate Identifier

• http://dissertations.umi.com/northwestern:14959
• etdadmin_upload_711355

Keyword

• Cultural Markets
• Social influence
• Creativity
• Networks
• Music

Date created

• 2019-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright