

The Album Network

We have studied social networks in the music industry. The result is a network of the best albums of all time.



Recording an album brings singers, producers, musicians, audio engineers and many other professions together. We know from the press that a few "super"-producers work with many artists. But how does the large-scale social structure of the music industry look like? What is the social network behind the finest albums of all time?



We have studied the large-scale structure of music collaborations using the tools of network science. We considered all albums in Rolling Stone Magazine's list of 500 Greatest Albums of All Time and the 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die by Robert Dimery. The principal data source was Discogs.



The interactive map and the poster contain all albums from the Rolling Stone 500 List (i.e. just the largest connected component of that network).



Key Insights

The music industry is more tightly connected than we imagined! Almost every album in our sample is connected to every other album. The connections are often not the well known artists. Most albums are connected by people in the background, like drummers, background singers, or engineers. Mastering engineers turned out to be very important in holding this network together. The most central persons in the social network are mastering engineers Bob Ludwig and Howie Weinberg!



The most central albums are "In Rainbows" by Radiohead and "Live 1966" by Bob Dylan.