Collaborations and influences in new-age musician networks

Music industry is evolving rapidly over the past decades due to the revolution of digital recordings and distributions. The industry is flooded with innumerable music albums, and production houses are always looking for innovative strategies to present the albums to the listeners. For instance, they rely on recommendation-based systems to get attention from the listeners. Amidst the clouds of genres and tags to differentiate and organize the digital media, listeners have their own music taste and preference. By considering new-age music genre, musician networks are constructed using the data from AllMusic and Last.fm websites. Complex network structural properties such as nodes centralities, degree distribution, and community structure of the musician networks were investigated. The results show distinct differences in terms of defining new-age music and the main styles of new-age music. Furthermore, the musicians collaboration network reveals interesting collaboration trend in the new-age music industry. These observations may provide useful information and ideas in the establishment and improvement of music recommendation websites in near future.