Beyond the Springsteen Hypothesis: The Structure of American Popular Music Genres

• In Event: 202 - Regular Session. Popular Culture

Abstract

There is great excitement in the Sociology of Culture over investigating how cultural categories may affect creative behavior. This paper tests the “Bruce Springsteen Hypothesis”: that contemporary musical genre boundaries are weak, freeing artists from the creative constraints of genre conventions. Examining the genre combinations that over 3 Million bands on MySpace.com use to describe themselves as well as data on their popularity and geographical location, and utilizing networks, community detection, and Hierarchical Linear Modeling, we show that 1) over all, genre conventions continue to govern musical creation. But 2) genre conventions are stronger in Hip-Hop and Rock music scenes than in Niche/Underground ones. And that 3) contrary to existing literature, a band’s popularity is not consistently related to its level of musical unconventionality. Rather, 4) musical style and geographic location (with its associated demographics) are much stronger predictors of bands’ musical unconventionality. Metropolitan areas with a low number of Hip-Hop musicians, a large college student population, more racial diversity, and higher incomes, tend to encourage unconventionality. By identifying genres and local contexts that encourage and discourage unconventional genre combinations to varying degrees, our analysis shows that the musical universe is not monolithically organized but rather composed of multiple worlds that are differently structured—i,e, uncentered, single-centered, and multi-centered. Thus, at a higher level, this paper highlights the power of “big data” to identify disparate sub-effects and sub-systems within an aggregate population.

Authors

• Monica Lee, University of Chicago

• Daniel Silver, University of Toronto