Embeddedness and the Production of Novelty in Music: A Multi-Dimensional Perspective

Creativity and innovation are central to cultural production, but what makes certain producers more likely to innovate than others? We revisit the concept of embeddedness to evaluate how different dimensions of social 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, we estimate how musicians’ social, cultural, organizational, and geographic embeddedness affects 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 connected are more likely to create novel songs, especially when they span multiple genres, are women, or are in the early stages of their careers. Surprisingly, variations in social and organizational embeddedness do not significantly influence this outcome. These findings produce new insights into the production of novelty in music, and encourage us to further examine the multiplexity of embeddedness and its role in organizing innovation.