Dresden 2014 – scientific programme
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SOE: Fachverband Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme
SOE 2: Dynamics of Social and Financial Networks
SOE 2.4: Talk
Monday, March 31, 2014, 11:15–11:30, GÖR 226
The rise and the fall of musical genres and the evolution of music publishing networks — •Gamaliel Percino1, Peter Klimek1, and Stefan Thurner1,2,3 — 1Section for Science of Complex Systems, Medical University of Vienna, Spitalgasse 23, A-1090, Austria — 2Santa Fe Institute, 1399 Hyde Park Road, Santa Fe, NM 87501, USA — 3International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Schlossplatz 1, A-2361 Laxenburg, Austria
A music style is defined by a community of musicians with different skills to play different musical instruments. We present an analysis of a collection of bipartite networks attaching music styles to musical instruments, artists to musical instruments, and artists to music styles. We study the evolution of these networks from 1969 to 2010. We investigate the dynamics of bipartite network measures for music styles such as their instrumental diversity and ubiquity, i.e. how many other styles use similar musical instruments. Based on these measures one can obtain a similarity network for music styles which undergoes complex dynamical transitions. We compare the average change of diversity and ubiquity with the commercial success of the style as measured by Amazon sales rank per number of records by style. We find that in the last seven years music styles with decreasing diversity had more commercial success. These results suggest that popular music becomes more simplistic as it gains mainstream success.