On the Popularity of Classical Music Composers on Community-Driven Platforms.

Traditionally, the popularity of classical music composers is approximated through commercial figures like album releases, record sales, or live performances. However, commercial factors only provide one piece of the overall picture. The success of community-driven platforms has profoundly changed how people consume and interact with music, and, consequently, our understanding of what popularity is. People discuss their favourite artists, archive knowledge regarding them and share their work through multimedia platforms. In this paper, we investigate how data from these platforms can provide a more comprehensive view on popularity and engagement regarding the long-tail of classical music composers. We combine album release data provided by MusicBrainz, the commitment of people in maintaining the composers’ Wikipedia pages and user engagement in classical music videos on YouTube. Our analysis provides a complementary multi-faceted view on community engagement and urges future research to expand on user-generated content for a more diverse expression of popularity in the music domain.