Wherever you look, there’s always a struggle for fame, to become known for something and therefore to belong to a small elite, apart from the mass. The most obvious cases are casting shows on TV, but you’ll also find it in every career area, among book authors, abstract painters and politicians. It’s no rare phenomenon, rather a basic principle of communities. The ways which lead you from being a nobody to the incarnation as a star seem diverse, though. Nevertheless, stardom always means influence, and therefore power, or at least the chance of distributing your thoughts, creativity or products to a wider public.
The different music communities, and especially DnB, are no exception to this rule. Just like the stock markets are largely ruled by a certain couple of people’s decisions, there are certain labels and artists who influence the whole scene. Who are these people, and why are they the ones to decide what’s good?
When you take a closer look, the whole fame thing is no black-white-scheme. It’s more like a net, with the famous elements being big and massively linked in the center, and the nobodies at the edges. The interesting things happen in between, with newcomers on the rise and previously famous people losing popularity. Obviously, this net is quite subjective, as everyone has their own heroes and taste. Nevertheless, many people with widely similar taste would propbably agree on their view. What define’s an artists position in this popularity net?
There are several factors, depending on the artist’s role.
- A DJ (realistically!) is known, because of his work he’s done so far, so the time being a DJ in the scene is important. Also, the freshness of tunes and the number of events he’s played at. Yes, you’re right, there’s a couple of DJs, who qualify by their skills, but for a wide number, this doesn’t seem to count (oh yes, a lot of names of the later case come to mind). Nowadays, most “big” DJs are also producers anyway.
- A label is known for their output. How influencal and visionary it was, and which artists released on it.
- A producer is known, because he released important tunes. Important here means good or innovative.
Taken together, it’s a net of the three actor types. Think of a small piece of it, visualized above. Each Artist releasing on a label, and a remix or collaboration between artists is noted by a link. You can see the net growing in your mind, don’t you? To be fair, the lines should have different thickness, as specified by the number of occurances. You could define the whole thing one step further by putting in Top10 references or dubplate play times between DJs and producers. To make the whole concept realistic, each node should be weighted by a real-world number, like sales numbers of a label, and DJ’s gig count or fee. Dynamically grow/shrink the nodes by the weight of each link, and you’ll see the whole community and their most famous elements.
Interestingly, in science (of course, haha) there’s a popularity for each person, computed by the releases in scientific journals and these journals’ importance. Trust me: This ranking number is of maximum importance when it comes to getting an interesting job in a certain laboratory!
How do you get famous as a producer, then?
Make good tunes, collaborate with more famous people than you, get releases on good labels. That’s all. Good night and good fight.
Update
In the comments, Redshirt mentioned the Google PageRank algorithm, and it funnily also came to my mind, that we’re referring here to typical social networks. According to network theorist A. Barabási and his highly recommended book “Linked”, many systems in the real world are scale-free networks, meaning they contain a few hubs (very important and influencal elements of the net) and huge amounts of increasingly less important nodes. (so there’s a straight correlation between the the importance of a node and the number of its type). Examples are the web (think of Google, Yahoo, which are very influencal, and in contrast millions of homepage aka digital dirt), nets of sexual partners (in his books he examines the outbreak of AIDS), and many more. Obviously, the DnB community is another typical example.
Also, Kidbubble mentioned the influence of links on other links, like when someone you don’t know personally speaks good or bad about you to a mutual contact and thereby changes the way your link to this mutual contact is weighted (like pushing you or throwing you out of the game). The net is highly dynamic!
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