High-status affiliations and newcomer success: the case of live music
The context
How and how much do high-status affiliations affect the careers of new bands? In our recent study, this is what we tried to find out. We analyzed the role of these kinds of affiliations (i.e. associations with established musicians) and the role they play in shaping the careers of newcomers or entrants, in our case, specifically music bands.
Network affiliations are undoubtedly one of the most exhaustively investigated ways in which newcomers manage to find a foothold in a market. When talking about network affiliations, very often we hear mention of a signaling mechanism, which would enhance the entrant’s visibility and up their odds of long-term success. In our research, we revealed a second mechanism that we argue is particularly relevant in cultural markets, one that reflects how a new entrant’s perceived distinctiveness varies depending on that band’s affiliations.
If we make the same assumption as most of the academic literature on the topic – that signaling is the most effective mechanism – then when entrants play as the opening acts for high-status concerts, they can maximize their market position in terms of both legitimacy and exposure. But there is also a chance that a different situation could emerge. Under the same conditions, newcomers could run the risk of failing to attract enough attention from the public, which would mean their perceived distinctiveness would be insufficient.
If previous studies generally underscore the positive role of signaling, our findings go further to support the notion of “distinctiveness.” To explain, among the new bands in our sample, the ones that frequently appeared with A-list artists earned less and were more likely to break up before long.
The study
Tapping archival sources for biographies and concert data, interviews with musicians, and information on various musical genres, we investigated the effects of affiliations on the careers of 1,385 bands formed in the years 2000 to 2005. Our aim was to discover how many of them had benefited from appearing with a high-status act.
We sourced most of our data from TourINtel, a leading business intelligence service for concert promotors. We registered for the service and collected information on concerts held from 2000 to 2012. For each concert, the database recorded the playlist, information on the venue, the number of tickets sold and the gross revenues for each event. We used these data to compile a list of artists which we then cross-referenced with the online musical directory AllMusic, eliminating all the artists who were not included on this site. This initial step restricted our sample to 19,534 artists. For them, we collected data on biographies (for soloists), year formed (for bands), and musical genre.
At that point, since we had decided to limit our analysis to newcomers, we focused on the bands that were formed from 2000 to 2005, ultimately compiling a sample counting 1,385 bands. We opted to center our attention on bands, because the data available on soloists would not allow us to pinpoint the year they debuted. But with the bands in the sample, instead, we could find the year they started, which was listed on AllMusic for all the groups in our sample. This meant we were able to compile a sample of significant size, and we were also able to observe each band for at least six years from when it was first formed.
Last, we took our analysis further thanks to qualitative insights we gained by conducting several interviews with professionals from the world of music both in the US and in Canada, including booking agents and musicians. We utilized these interviews primarily to supplement our quantitative results and to enhance the hypothesis development process.
Conclusions and takeaways
In our article, we explored the role that high-status affiliations play in shaping the careers of new bands. The literature has fully examined the ways in which these affiliations benefit newcomers, but we advance the hypothesis that affiliations with successful artists can actually end up being detrimental to newcomers in contexts where success is contingent on competing for attention from the audience.
What emerged from our research is that high-status affiliations dilute, and indeed actually diminish the amount of attention that the audience pays to the entrant. And less attention translates into lower revenue generation by newcomers, which ultimately jeopardizes their survival on the music scene.
On the other hand, we found no significant interaction in the revenue models. In fact, the effect of high-status affiliations on the revenues of a band does not change during its life cycle. This result suggests that over time, high-status bands continue to have a negative effect on revenues of entrants, an effect that we might attribute to the fact that, in our context, they probably capture most of the revenues when they appear with a lower-status band.
Overall, our findings support our main hypothesis: in the market of live music performances, the setting for our study, the advantage that comes from high-status affiliation for a new band does not offset the effects of the diluted attention that arises from such an affiliation (at least not entirely).
Our work serves to deepen academic knowledge of corporate dynamics in creative industries. The findings from our study also prompt us to reflect on social networks in creative markets, and to apply and incorporate these reflections to more clearly determine how network position affects the chances of a new artist to be recognized as distinctive.
