How are new music genres born?

In our previous blog post about the last paper I described where innovation in music happens and which characteristics of music scenes are associated with musical creativity. With the same database we also took a more closer look at the process of genre emergence. We took concepts from Evolutionary Economic Geography, which are mainly used to analyze the emergence of new industries and transferred them to the context of the music industry. We wanted to know: Are new music genres the result of related or unrelated diversification?

The thing with artists is, they like to break the rules. So it really is not a given that the new genres they create are similar to what already happens around them. Is anything is “in the air”, it is music and it flow very freely around the world, especially in today’s digital world. So it could very well be that their inspiration comes from anywhere, not their direct surroundings. But on the other hand, new genres also have to be understood to find an audience. Local music scenes often show a certain specialization, and musicians (and their fans and industry) like to cluster around a common understanding of what music is good. In short, there are good reasons for new music genres to be the result of either related or unrelated diversification.

In our database based on last.fm data (see previous post) we identified 118 new music genres that emerged between 1970 and 2015. For a lot of methodological reasons, these genres (Fig.1) mostly arose beween 1970 and 2000. It just takes a while, until user-generated data picks up on new genres, especially as we used rather high thresholds to acknowledge a genre as a new genre — 30 artists in our database of 9000 artists from 33 North American and European cities had to be tagged with it on last.fm. Some musicologists may also argue that in the digital world, new genres do not easily arise and diffuse. Can you name other genres that weren’t around before 2005 that really made it to the mainstream?

For each music genre we identified the pioneering artists and their birth places. Using last.fm tagging data allowed us to identify other genres that these pioneering artists were also tagged with — we called these “parent genres”, when they were older than the new genre itself. They can be regarded as the genres that new genres spawned from. A depiction of the new genre Trap and its parent genres in its birthplace Atlanta can be seen in Fig. 2

We looked at whether these parent genres were existing in the birthplaces of new genres before. The new genres as identified in Fig. 1 were pioneered by 661 artists, who were co-tagged with 1604 unique parent genres. Every parent genre was counted only once to avoid bias when multiple pioneers from the same city were tagged with the new genre and the same co-tags. Of the remaining 1604 parent genres, 1079 (67.3%) were present before in the respective birthplace. These are called local parent genres in the following. The remaining 525 parent genres that were not present in the birthplace before are understood as extra-local. While local parent genres point to the process of related diversification, extra-local parent genres point to the importance of unrelated diversification.

We then constructed two indices: The local index — the share of parent genres of new genres that were existing in the local music scene before — and the Specialization Index — the share of parent of genres that birthplaces were specialized in, indicated by them having a location quotient >1.

Fig. 3 shows the relative frequency of the these indices for our 118 new genres. As the left graph shows, most genres arose with more than half of their parent genres being existent in the music scene before. However, the right graph shows that apparently, the parent genres aren’t necessarily specializations of the music scene.

This figure show that related diversification plays a greater role for the emergence of new symbolic knowledge than unrelated diversification. However, at the same time, only for 15 genres extra-local parent genres did not play any role. Obviously, it is a mix of related and unrelated diversification that leads to the emergence of most new music genres.

Actually, at the beginning of this study, we didn’t think that there were many extra-local parent genres, that is, parent genres not existing in the music scene before. But as a third of parent genres was extra-local we wanted to analyze them further. We decided to look at their age (years since first emergence), diffusion (number of cities they were present in) and popularity (number of artists tagged with them).

As Fig. 4 indicates and statistical tests underlined, extralocal parent genres were were different from local parent genres: They were younger, less diffused and less popular. This is a sign that extralocal parent genres are trends and fashions that were starting to get popular at the time the new genres were born.

A statistical test on the local parent genres (see paper) versus those genres that did not become parent genres also showed us that the local parent genres are often those genres that are central in our network-based music scenes, especially those with a high betweenness were more likely to become parent genres.

What this means, is that new genres arise from a mix of local specificities with fashions and trends from elsewhere. When a new trend comes up, such as punk, rap, or dubstep, it travels around the world and interacts with the music scenes it encounters. As every music scene is a bit different and has a different understanding of these new trends (and also wants to create something new from it), new variations of these trends emerge, leading to the creation of new music genres. It shows a beautiful example of the interaction of the local and the global and how it creates new pieces and forms of art.

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