https://doi.org/10.1140/epjds/s13688-024-00476-z
Research
First-mover advantage in music
1
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany
2
Institute for Advanced Computational Science, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, USA
3
Institut Jean Nicod, Département d’études cognitives, ENS, EHESS, PSL Research University, CNRS, Paris, France
4
Max Planck Institute for Geoanthropology, Jena, Germany
Received:
11
September
2023
Accepted:
26
April
2024
Published online:
17
May
2024
Why do some songs and musicians become successful while others do not? We show that one of the reasons may be the “first-mover advantage”: artists that stand at the foundation of new music genres tend to be more successful than those who join these genres later on. To test this hypothesis, we have analyzed a massive dataset of over 920,000 songs, including 110 music genres: 10 chosen intentionally and preregistered, and 100 chosen randomly. For this, we collected the data from two music services: Spotify, which provides detailed information about songs’ success (the precise number of times each song was listened to), and Every Noise at Once, which provides detailed genre tags for musicians. 91 genres, out of 110, show the first-mover advantage—clearly suggesting that it is an important mechanism in music success and evolution.
Key words: First-mover advantage / Innovation / Success / Music / Genre
Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at https://doi.org/10.1140/epjds/s13688-024-00476-z.
© The Author(s) 2024
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
