Comparing the Italian and Danish Music Industries With Network Analysis

Making music is a collaborative effort, and understanding artistic endeavors with a network science lens has been a prolific field of study. Recently, a new approach produced a novel database of Italian music and analyzed it with innovative network analysis techniques to find music eras, a data-driven genre classification and a specialization index based on how bands share artists to publish records. In this work, we expand the previous work by adding data from Denmark and recording music labels’ information. We are interested in investigating whether the music eras and genre classifications found in previous work were universal, or whether they are driven by context-specific dynamics in a country. We find that only the most superficial structural statistics are preserved between Denmark and Italy. However, music eras, genre classifications, and artist specialization are actually different between the two countries. This shows how, to get a more complete picture of contemporary music production, the view from a single country is not enough.