Investigating Crowd Creativity in Online Music Communities
This work addresses collaboration dynamics in creative online communities, but it is incremental as it applies known factors from prior research to new data.
The study investigated factors predicting successful collaboration in online music communities, finding that success is linked to high community status of authors and low derivativity of songs.
Crowd creativity is typically associated with peer-production communities focusing on artistic products like animations, video games, and music, but less frequently to Open Source Software (OSS), despite the fact that also developers must be creative to come up with new solutions to their technical challenges. In this paper, we conduct a study to further the understanding of which factors from prior work in both OSS and art communities are predictive of successful collaboration - defined as reuse of previous songs - in three different songwriting communities, namely Songtree, Splice, and ccMixter. The main findings from this study confirm that the success of collaborations is associated with high community status of recognizable authors and low degree of derivativity of songs.