E-Magazine
Professor Erik Noyes
How do creative industries such as music, gaming, and software evolve and where do new markets emerge from? This article details ongoing research on the evolution of the Popular Music Industry (1955-2009) focusing on new market creation.
A Changing Sound
Globally, the Popular Music Industry is a multi-billion dollar industry with sales exceeding $5 billion dollars annually in the United States alone. The creation of new markets and the associated entrepreneurial behavior of artists is a source of industry growth, industry disruption and new wealth.
Since the mid-1950’s and the early artistic innovations of such musicians as Fats Domino, Little Richard and Elvis Presley, the Popular Music Industry has fractured into 193 distinct markets including Blues-Rock, Acid Folk, Scandinavian Metal, Rockabilly Revival, Aboriginal Rock, Korean Pop, Grindcore, Obscuro and Christian Rock. Leadership or “first-mover” status in key markets has created significant wealth and opportunities for those artists and music companies who have led the formation of new markets. While most innovations in the music industry have only been incremental, others have yielded artistic products distinct from prior creative accomplishments – something different from the contents of prior musical markets.
Mapping Artistic Influences
In an attempt to predict the creation of new markets in creative industries, we examined the role of artistic influences in the market creation process. John Lennon once remarked about The Beatles, “At least the first forty songs we wrote were Buddy Holly influenced.” His comment suggests that it is hard to assess the originality and contributions of an artist without considering an artist’s musical influences. Similarly, for decades artists have inspired each others to explore and blend new forms of music all impacting the development of the music industry’s market structure.
Giving Credit
Generously, the overwhelming majority of artists in the Popular Music Industry give credit to their musical influences – both near and distant - as a source of their inspiration and material for artistic innovation. Analyzing an authoritative database of over 14,000 influences among major artists in the Popular Music Industry (1955-2009) we asked: are there particularly fertile historical patterns of artistic influences for the purposes of producing innovation and leading the creation of new markets? Put differently, viewing artistic influences as a type of arms-length network, are there superior structural positions in the network of artistic influences for spawning new markets? For example, do path breakers have uncommonly diverse influences (e.g., considering contemporary and historical influences) or do they uniquely draw from historically unrelated markets? Having collected this fascinating data, we wanted to decode the importance of artistic influences in one creative industry.
What’s Original?
The research sets up two very different potential measurements for what is original in a creative industry. Namely, one view is that the most original artists who may lead in the creation of new markets have very few or no identifiable artistic influences; this fits the stereotype of the angst-ridden artist who birth’s innovation from isolation. A dramatically different measurement of originality is that the most original artists have several identifiable artistic influences and manage to fuse widely disparate influences together to birth innovation. Others have wrestled with similar questions in the area of intellectual property and specifically with patents – do disruptive innovations come from isolated genius, or oppositely, from the highly social recombination of others’ celebrated achievements?
Implications for Other Creative Industries
The questions, although currently focused on the music industry, have broad potential implications for other creative industries where new market creation is a source of industry growth, industry disruption and wealth. Much like artists in the music industry, software designers celebrate, reference, and even directly build on code from their analogous luminaries – Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Linus Torvalds, Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg. Comparably, game design teams revere and recombine their favorite personal touchstones, or prior industry accomplishments, to distinguish their contributions. While external societal and technological factors undoubtedly shape market creation, much innovation in creative industries apparently stems from an industry’s fascination with itself and how existing achievements can be recombined and extended to create new value.
Summary
Although the research is in process, our initial findings highlight the deep social nature of new market creation in creative industries. Namely, new markets do not emerge from a vacuum. Rather, they evolve from prior markets and particularly the influences and creative accomplishments of past artists. Shifting industry “touchstones” make up much of the rotating raw material from which new innovations and new markets are born.
Assistant Professor Erik Noyes, Blank Center for Entrepreneurship, Babson College, U.S.A.