Manav Raj, Management, The Wharton School
Abstract: This research proposes to study how presence on and removal from a digital platform that facilitates virality affects the performance and production of creative goods. We hope to study this question utilizing data on musical artists’ presence and performance across channels such as TikTok, Spotify, and YouTube. We think of this project as consisting of two parts. In the first phase of this research, we hope to leverage the quasi-exogenous removal of UMG-signed musical artists from the TikTok platform to explore how removal from that platform affects performance in other markets (specifically, Spotify and YouTube). We expect that removal from the TikTok platform will result in a baseline negative effect on artist performance, but then hope to probe heterogeneity in artist responses and understand when participation on the TikTok platform is more or less beneficial for an artist. We believe that it will be most important for new or lesser-known artists, highlighting the role that platforms like TikTok play in facilitating search and discovery. As a second order question, we will then explore how “virality” on a platform like TikTok affects future performance and content production. On a platform like TikTok, virality is often a function of grass-roots consumer behavior rather than planned strategies by content producers. When content quasi-exogenously “goes viral” (i.e., becomes suddenly popular independent of producer actions) on a platform like TikTok, it is likely to have an impact on the performance of the producer in other market settings and may also shape the kinds of content that the producer creates in the future. We hope to study this by collecting data on tracks and artists that have gone viral and comparing their future performance and production to a matched set of control artists. To acquire data for this research, we are in talks with Chartmetric, a music market analytics company, to get access to their API. Mack Institute funding would cover the cost of API access and allow us to collect data for this research.