"Stars" of Russian Popular Music: Creative Collaborations and Artistic Success

Collaborations between musicians is an influential tool for an increase of both creativity of produced songs and the popularity of artists that collaborate. This work is investigating the collaborations in the Russian music field and the effect of the network that artists create via collaborations with each other and various attributive factors authors have on the popularity of artists. The data obtained from 4 main pop radio stations in Russia presented a compilation of charts for the 10-year period from 2010 to 2020 with attributive data for artists. Attributive factors for the analysis in this work were considered labels of artists (major or indie), their gender (male or female), the number of genres they are affiliated to, and the generation of the artist (soviet or post-soviet). As the work is a combination of quantitative methods and social network analysis, in this work the combination of network measures respective statistical tests were done for the analysis. With a series of tests of hypotheses, the results that were obtained show that the most influential fact for all the used metrics of popularity is an affiliation of artists with major labels. Another influential factor is the number of genres an author is affiliated to – the more genres musician belongs to, the more popular they are, yet, it does not guarantee prestige in the musical field. The effect of gender has not been found influential, yet artists have a slight tendency to collaborate with artists of the same gender than with artists of the opposite gender. Generations of artists had no influential effect on popularity.