The Social Network of Contemporary Popular Musicians

Fresh from the arxiv...

Here is the info:

The Social Network of Contemporary Popular Musicians
Authors: Juyong Park, Oscar Celma, Markus Koppenberger, Pedro Cano, Javier M. Buldú
Comments: 7 pages, 2 figures
Subj-class: Physics and Society

In this paper we analyze two social network datasets of contemporary musicians constructed from allmusic.com (AMG), a music and artists' information database: one is the collaboration network in which two musicians are connected if they have performed in or produced an album together, and the other is the similarity network in which they are connected if they where musically similar according to music experts. We find that, while both networks exhibit typical features of social networks such as high transitivity, several key network features, such as degree as well as betweenness distributions suggest fundamental differences in music collaborations and music similarity networks are created.


You can get the article here.

Now that this article has been written, maybe we can use network theory to define a pretentiousness scale of somebody's musical taste. It can be kind of like the H-index, and I'm confident the information it provides will be comparably useful for tenure cases.

(A point of reference for the last comment: As soon as the H-index paper was posted on the arXiv, the head of Georgia Tech's physics department immediately computed its value for all the faculty and discussed it with them. I heard about this and gagged.)