Come Together, Right Now? An Empirical Study of Collaborations in the Music Industry

Artist collaborations in music have been on the rise, and they tend to produce commercially and critically successful songs. We seek to uncover the effect of these collaborative projects on career trajectories and identify the factors that lift an artist’s profile in the short and long term. We develop a theory of collaboration based on the transfer of capital between the collaborating artists that facilitates spillovers across time. To validate the theory, we use weekly radio plays of individual songs across 25 European countries between the years 2011 to 2018, together with a multiattribute Spotify data set of songs and Hofstede’s cultural dimensions in relation to artist origins. We create pairs of similar artists who released a collaboration and a solo song in the same week and measure the impact of collaborations based on the difference-in-differences methodology. We find that releasing a collaboration song, in comparison with a solo song, increases the number of plays of an artist in the future by +4.6%. This lift can be broken down into +9.6% for the current song and +7.7% for subsequently released songs, whereas past songs are unaffected. The effect is moderated by the difference in economic, social, and cultural capitals and is significantly larger when one’s partner has higher economic and social capital or is highly dissimilar along the cultural dimension. Our theoretical and empirical exploration of such strategic alliances uncovers several underlying mechanisms at play in the success of these pairings and can serve as the basis for future work targeted at prescriptive contributions.