UCL School of Management is delighted to welcome Michael Mauskapf to host a research seminar discussing ‘The production of novelty in music: A relational perspective.’​

Abstract

Creativity and innovation are central to the cultural production process, but what makes certain producers more likely to innovate than others? I revisit the concept of embeddedness to evaluate how different dimensions of relational structure affect the production of novelty in music. Using original data on over 10,000 unique artists and 115,000 songs recorded and released between 1960 and 1995, I measure and estimate how musicians’ social, cultural, organizational, and geographic embeddedness shape their propensity to create novel products. Results from a series of Relational Event Models (REM’s) suggest that artists who are highly culturally and geographically embedded are more likely to write and record novel songs, especially when they span multiple genres. Variations in social and organizational embeddedness do not significantly affect this outcome. These findings produce new insights into the production of novelty, and encourage us to reconsider the multiplexity of embeddedness and its role in organizing innovation.