In popular music, collaborations rock

FEW who have given an address at Harvard Business School have a CV like that of Khaled Mohamed Khaled, who spoke there in 2016. The 42-year-old music producer began his career as a record-store clerk and radio host. Today DJ Khaled, as he is known to fans, is one of the world’s most successful hip-hop artists. Although critics may disagree on the merits of Mr Khaled’s music, his selling strategy—bringing together the hottest pop stars of the moment—is worthy of any business-school classroom. America’s music industry is increasingly following his formula.

Collaborations like those assembled by Mr Khaled are nothing new. Ever since the hip-hop group Run-DMC teamed up with Aerosmith, a rock band, to record “Walk This Way” in 1986, record labels have recognised that combining the fan bases of multiple artists can be a boon to record sales. The practice has spread. According to data from the Billboard Hot 100, a weekly ranking of the most popular singles in America, collaborations now represent more than a third of hit songs (see chart). Of the top ten songs on the current Hot 100 chart, half are credited to more than one artist.

Many of them are songwriters. Today’s pop songs are manufactured by an assembly line of writers and producers, in what Larry Miller, director of New York University’s Steinhardt Music Business Programme, calls an “industrial song-writing machine”. It takes an average of nearly four songwriters to craft a hit song, up from two in the 1980s. Bruno Mars’s “That’s What I Like”, which was named song of the year at the 60th annual Grammy awards on January 28th, credits no fewer than eight.

Hip-hop’s growing influence has meanwhile brought more guest artists into the recording studio. Nielsen, a market-research firm, calls R&B/hip-hop America’s most popular genre. It has a culture of collaboration. The best representation of this might be the “posse cut”, a style of song in which as many as half a dozen rappers take turns delivering a verse. Hip-hop artists continue to collaborate at higher rates than peers. Hit Songs Deconstructed, a music-analytics firm, estimates that 64% of hip-hop tracks that reached the Billboard top ten in 2017 featured more than one artist, compared with 40% of pop songs.

Streaming services may also be encouraging popular artists to jump on each others’ tracks. Although radio stations remain highly segregated, based on what Nate Sloan, a musicologist and co-host of the “Switched on Pop” podcast, calls “mostly fictitious categories devised by marketing executives”, services like Spotify and Apple Music blur the lines between genres. A Spotify user who searches, for example, for Kendrick Lamar, a hip-hop artist, may find tracks featuring Maroon 5 and Imagine Dragons, groups rarely heard on conventional hip-hop radio stations.

It may be tempting to dismiss DJ Khaled-style pop songs as contrived and inauthentic. But new research suggests that listeners are attracted to the familiar yet distinctive sound often found in collaborative tracks. Using a database of nearly 27,000 songs that appeared on the Billboard Hot 100 charts between 1958 and 2016, Noah Askin of INSEAD, a French business school, and Michael Mauskapf of Columbia Business School find that the most successful songs tend to be different but not too different, a sweet spot the authors refer to as “optimal differentiation”. Collaborations that combine a familiar artist with a newcomer, or a mainstream act with an edgier one, may yield precisely the kind of music that listeners want.