Collaboration Networks in the Music Industry

Abstract: Recording an album brings singers, producers, musicians, audio engineers, and many other professions together. We know from the press that a few "super"-producers work with many artists. But how does the large-scale social structure of the music industry look like? What is the social network behind the finest albums of all time? In this paper we studied the large-scale structure of music collaborations using the tools of network science. We considered all albums in Rolling Stone Magazine's list of '500 Greatest Albums of All Time' and the '1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die' by Robert Dimery. We found that the existing research on collaboration networks is corroborated by the particular collaboration network in the music industry. Furthermore, it has been found that the most important professions of the music industry in terms of connectivity were main artists and engineers.