Data from: Significance and popularity in music production

Creative industries constantly strive for fame and popularity. Though
highly desirable, popularity is not the only achievement artistic
creations might ever acquire. Leaving a longstanding mark in the global
production and influencing future works is an even more important
achievement, usually acknowledged by experts and scholars. ‘Significant’
or ‘influential’ works are not always well known to the public or have
sometimes been long forgotten by the vast majority. In this paper, we
focus on the duality between what is successful and what is significant in
the musical context. To this end, we consider a user-generated set of tags
collected through an online music platform, whose evolving co-occurrence
network mirrors the growing conceptual space underlying music production.
We define a set of general metrics aiming at characterizing music albums
throughout history, and their relationships with the overall musical
production. We show how these metrics allow to classify albums according
to their current popularity or their belonging to expert-made lists of
important albums. In this way, we provide the scientific community and the
public at large with quantitative tools to tell apart popular albums from
culturally or aesthetically relevant artworks. The generality of the
methodology presented here lends itself to be used in all those fields
where innovation and creativity are in play.