The graphs here show "significant sharing of artists" as lines between nodes (bands at an average point in album releases). I like this, but I think it leaves a lot out of the overall story.
It's much, much harder to compile a dataset that captures the path of music _influence_ as a way to measure it's impact. Yet, I wonder if that would look at all different? Consider the impact that one Giorgio Moroder had on electronic music globally, both in terms of "Italo Disco" and more. He's clearly in the article's illustrations _somewhere_, but as a solo artist and producer, may have few if any connections (collaborations & credits) to other Italian groups.
Very cool. Although I wonder if the analysis really answered the question it set out to ask. The author's hypothesis was that the "entirety of contemporary Italian music rests on the shoulders of Gianni Maroccolo." He then tries to show this by showing who played music with who.
I would imagine that influence could be transferred even without artists playing in each other's bands. I can think of plenty of extremely influential bands that defined the start of a whole genre, whose members never played in another band.
But perhaps the original argument that the author was making was that Maroccolo is important because he played with everyone, in which case this analysis makes sense.
Anyway, cool networks.
Great stuff. Network Backboning with Noisy Data paper that this is based on is even more interesting IMO. https://www.michelecoscia.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/201...
I have followed this guy for some years now, and he keeps doing marvelous stuff on complex networks and related analysis. I worked on the two parts of a similar idea regarding post-rock music; the first part became a Medium post [1], while I never finished the second one (although the idea is to publish it, I also do research on complex networks and their analysis).
[1] https://medium.com/festival-peak/exploring-the-post-rock-wor...
I have been a big Litfiba fan during their early career and loved this cover of Bowie's Yassassin by them. Maroccolo was their bassist.
It's not viagra ad $/h can the american small brain even grasp this type of idea?
What a fascinating dataset they've constructed. Is the network available for download somewhere? I didn't see anything obvious.
Lovely analysis, some new music for me, and love to see work from former colleagues get recognition - hi Michele!
Degree, closeness, and betweenness all seem like poor choices to make such an important decision. Why not HITS?
I'm not certain HITS could capture what appears to be the temporal component of the network the author incorporates.
I agree that it's difficult, I don't know much about centrality measures for dynamic networks.
However, degree sounds like a bad measure, since the value can be drastically increased by participating in a (few) big project(s).
You can't have a correct vision of Italian music (staying only on that subsubsubcategory) of the 80s, 90s, 00s, 10s and 20s like that, at very best you'd end up ignoring significant artists and whole genres.
HITS doesn't refer to musical hit records. It's a network analysis technique.
What a great story this project tells.
As Italian I never tought about it, but it makes lot of sense
In my misspent high school/college years, I was in search of very obscure, unpopular music, on independent and import labels. I began to find that much of the music that appealed to me was the fruit of collaboration between certain artists, producers, and labels. So I began to trace them out and, at that point, new music discovery consisted of finding brief and obscure collabs among the circle of artists that I was targeting.
For example, The Cure was exclusively signed to Fiction Records, which was more or less a vanity press for them, but they indeed had labelmates who were really, really obscure, and could always be connected back to Cure personnel.
It was sort of an amazing feeling, that everything was really interconnected in unexpected ways. In hindsight, all that music was a terrible influence and I was wasting time and money, but I also learned quite a bit about the record industry and collectibles, such as how to appraise the value of a piece, detect counterfeits vs. authentic pieces, and methods for archiving and preservation. My parents had collected postcards, stamps and other ephemera, and it sort of rubbed off on me!
... and Fabrizio De André [1][2]?