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Recombination for innovation and market impact: Samples and features in hip hop music

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Abstract

Innovation and new ideas often arise in contexts that are more conducive to the recombination of existing knowledge. I use data from hip hop chart rankings and YouTube video views to uncover patterns of this recombination and measure their impact in a cultural setting. This genre of music is used because, more than others, it has the custom of explicitly featuring guest artists and samples of existing songs. These processes provide a quantifiable measure of the extent of recombination of existing knowledge in the new songs’ creative process. I find that songs that more explicitly rely on recombination have greater impact. The results suggest that the more successful songs include not just novelty, but novelty together with elements of conventionality. This is in line with other analyses of innovation and impact in other creative industries. The propensity for recombinant strategies to uncover valuable innovation depends on the geographic, institutional, cultural and network structures where this search takes place. Hip hop music, through its explicit use of features and samples, illustrates some characteristics of successful recombinant innovation that can be extended to other genres and creative industries.

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Data availability

The dataset used in this paper is available upon request.

Notes

  1. Thus, a song that entered in 2015 but was still in the charts in 2016 is included, as well as songs that entered in 2016 but only left in 2017. This makes a sample of 463 songs. The chart lists the top 50 songs each week as calculated by Billboard. https://www.billboard.com/charts/r-b-hip-hop-songs

  2. The sampling data is from https://www.whosampled.com/ a online site that crowdsources the search of samples to “Explore the DNA of music”.

  3. https://distrokid.com/

  4. The collaboration between RUN-DMC and Aerosmith re-recoding the latter’s hit ‘Walk This Way’ with a rap feel is often held as the defining moment when rap started to grow beyond its traditional fan base (Rose 1994: loc 1612). This is another example of how recombination of existing information can have special impact. From the point of view of mainstream markets it was a combination of something safe and conventional with something new and risqué.

  5. See for example https://djbooth.net/features/2016-02-24-rappers-guest-verse-trade.

  6. http://songexploder.net/

  7. The three lone thinkers are “first-century Confucian metaphysicist Wang Chung, 14th-century Zen spiritualist Bassui Tokusho, and fourteenth century Arabic philosopher Ibn Khaldun” Uzzi and Spiro (2005: 448).

  8. If most songs in the sample were one-hit wonders, this variable could be endogenous, as the number of followers on Spotify would be determined by that song’s success. Almost the totality of artists in the sample had long careers (average year started = 2005) and several hits.

  9. Table 3 in the appendix shows descriptive statistics.

  10. It may seem odd that Canadian Rap is a major genre. This is because two Canadian rap artists, Drake and The Weeknd hold 70 of the 463 songs that made it to the Billboard Hip Hop / R&B charts in 2016.

  11. See Frieler et al (2015: 42–43) for a review. They cite a study by Pachet and Roy (2008) that used machine learning techniques on a database of 32,000 songs to predict commercial success. The conclusion was that ‘Hit Song Science is not yet a science’.

  12. http://everynoise.com/engenremap.html

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  1. Department of Economics, University of Brasília, Brasília, Brazil

    Bernardo Mueller

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Table 3 Descriptive Statistics
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Mueller, B. Recombination for innovation and market impact: Samples and features in hip hop music. J Evol Econ 32, 929–953 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00191-022-00771-w

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