Hip-hop’s culture of teamwork brings many voices to the studio and the growth of music streaming is breaking down genre barriers

1. 27/5/2018 In popular music, collaborations rock - Banding together
https://www.economist.com/business/2018/02/03/in-popular-music-collaborations-rock 1/4
Banding together
In popular music, collaborations rock
Hip-hop’s culture of teamwork brings many voices to the studio and the growth of music
streaming is breaking down genre barriers
Print edition | Business Feb 3rd 2018

2. 27/5/2018 In popular music, collaborations rock - Banding together
https://www.economist.com/business/2018/02/03/in-popular-music-collaborations-rock 2/4
FEW who have given an address at Harvard Business School have a CV like that of
Khaled Mohamed Khaled, who spoke there in 2016. The 42-year-old music
producer began his career as a record-store clerk and radio host. Today DJ Khaled,
as he is known to fans, is one of the world’s most successful hip-hop artists.
Although critics may disagree on the merits of Mr Khaled’s music, his selling
strategy—bringing together the hottest pop stars of the moment—is worthy of any
business-school classroom. America’s music industry is increasingly following his
formula.
Collaborations like those assembled by Mr Khaled are nothing new. Ever since the
hip-hop group Run-DMC teamed up with Aerosmith, a rock band, to record “Walk
This Way” in 1986, record labels have recognised that combining the fan bases of
multiple artists can be a boon to record sales. The practice has spread. According to
data from the Billboard Hot 100, a weekly ranking of the most popular singles in
America, collaborations now represent more than a third of hit songs (see chart). Of
the top ten songs on the current Hot 100 chart, half are credited to more than one
artist.
PUBLICIDAD

3. 27/5/2018 In popular music, collaborations rock - Banding together
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Many of
them are
songwriters. Today’s pop songs are
manufactured by an assembly line of writers and producers, in what Larry Miller,
director of New York University’s Steinhardt Music Business Programme, calls an
“industrial song-writing machine”. It takes an average of nearly four songwriters to
craft a hit song, up from two in the 1980s. Bruno Mars’s “That’s What I Like”, which
was named song of the year at the 60th annual Grammy awards on January 28th,
credits no fewer than eight.
Hip-hop’s growing influence has meanwhile brought more guest artists into the
recording studio. Nielsen, a market-research firm, calls R&B/hip-hop America’s
most popular genre. It has a culture of collaboration. The best representation of
this might be the “posse cut”, a style of song in which as many as half a dozen
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4. 27/5/2018 In popular music, collaborations rock - Banding together
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rappers take turns delivering a verse. Hip-hop artists continue to collaborate at
higher rates than peers. Hit Songs Deconstructed, a music-analytics firm, estimates
that 64% of hip-hop tracks that reached the Billboard top ten in 2017 featured more
than one artist, compared with 40% of pop songs.
Streaming services may also be encouraging popular artists to jump on each others’
tracks. Although radio stations remain highly segregated, based on what Nate
Sloan, a musicologist and co-host of the “Switched on Pop” podcast, calls “mostly
fictitious categories devised by marketing executives”, services like Spotify and
Apple Music blur the lines between genres. A Spotify user who searches, for
example, for Kendrick Lamar, a hip-hop artist, may find tracks featuring Maroon 5
and Imagine Dragons, groups rarely heard on conventional hip-hop radio stations.
It may be tempting to dismiss DJ Khaled-style pop songs as contrived and
inauthentic. But new research suggests that listeners are attracted to the familiar
yet distinctive sound often found in collaborative tracks. Using a database of nearly
27,000 songs that appeared on the Billboard Hot 100 charts between 1958 and 2016,
Noah Askin of INSEAD, a French business school, and Michael Mauskapf of
Columbia Business School find that the most successful songs tend to be different
but not too different, a sweet spot the authors refer to as “optimal differentiation”.
Collaborations that combine a familiar artist with a newcomer, or a mainstream act
with an edgier one, may yield precisely the kind of music that listeners want.
This article appeared in the Business section of the print edition under the headline "Banding together"