How Do Multi-Professional Repeated Collaborations In Music Production Shape Product Success?

As an essential part in everyone’s daily life,music not only fulfills our mental needs,but also brings substantial economic value to our society.To satisfy consumer’s increasing needs of music products,music production in today’s industry is more collaborative than ever before,which means that the production rarely relies on the independent creation of singer any more,but brings many professional artists,who perform as different roles in the production,together.How collaborative music products make success? To answer this practical question,this research creatively starts from the collaborative property of music products.Through a series of investigations of collaborative procedure in music production and the multi-professional collaborations,this research focus on repeated collaboration,one of the most important research topics in the inter-personal collaborations,to figure out the influence of repeated collaborations on music product success.Repeated collaborations mean that individual choose to collaborate with whom they used to collaborate before,since these collaborators are reliable,similar to themselves,and willing to invest their time and energy into the collaborative projects.This research reviews current findings on the influence of repeated collaborations on product success,and finds that current research not only seldom focuses on the labor division and the heterogeneous effects of different roles in shaping the relationship between repeated collaborations and product success,but also seldom studies and empirically tests the mechanism of the effect of repeated collaborations on product success.Thus,they are inappropriate to explain the effect of multi-professional repeated collaborations on music product success.To improve this research gap and contribute to our standings of music production,this research focuses on the multi-professional repeated collaborations in music production,and proposes three most important roles,which includes singer,writer,and producer.This research creatively categorized the inter-role collaborations between these three roles into two groups,stylefocused and efficiency-focused collaborations.This research hypothesizes that style-focused repeated collaborations improve product success,while efficiency-focused repeated collaborations restrain product success.This heterogeneous effect of repeated collaborations on success starts from the multi-professional property of music production,implies a possible negative effect of repeated collaborations,and thus contributes to the current findings of repeated collaborations.Furthermore,this research hypothesizes that the focal song’s adaptability mediates the negative effect of style-focused repeated collaborations on music success.To test the above hypothesis,this research constructed a novel,multi-source,and largescale dataset.Using web crawler,this research retrieved more than 100 thousand songs that are released between 1999 and 2019,and collected their collaborations information,release information,unstructured musical features,and songs’ performance on Billboard Hot100 charts and popularity on Spotify streaming service.This research built a dynamic collaboration network in the music industry.Through a series of empirical models and thorough robustness checks,this research demonstrates that,all things being equal,repetitions in style-focused collaborations decrease song success,while repetitions in efficiency-focused collaborations increase song success.Song’s adaptability reflects the similarity between this focal song and contemporary songs,and mediates the negative influence of style-focused repeated collaborations on song success.This mediation effect suggests that,repetitions in style-focused collaborations limits the communications between in-group artists and other artists and the division of knowledge.This isolation makes it hard for the focal song to adapt to the temporal changes of consumers’ musical preference and music consumption behavior,and finally fail for the lack of adaptability and vitality.These findings not only contribute to the literature on the influence of repeated collaborations on product success,the hidden mechanism of these influence,and the drivers of song success,but also bring a lot of implications to managers and artists.