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 on-line music platform, whose evolving co-occurrence network mirrors the growing conceptual space underlying music production. We define a set of general metrics aiming at characterising 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.创意产业始终致力于追求名望与流行度。尽管流行度极具吸引力，但艺术创作所能达成的成就绝非仅止于此。在全球创作领域留下持久印记、影响后世作品，是更为重要的成就，这一点通常得到专家学者的认可。“具有重要意义”或“具备影响力”的作品，未必总能为大众熟知，有时甚至早已被绝大多数人遗忘。 本文聚焦音乐语境中“成功”与“重要”二者的二元关系。为此，我们采用了某在线音乐平台收集的用户生成标签集，其不断演化的共现网络可反映音乐创作背后日益拓展的概念空间。我们定义了一组通用度量指标，用于刻画历史上的音乐专辑及其与整体音乐创作的关联。 我们证明，借助这些度量指标，可依据专辑当前的流行度，或是其是否被纳入专家编制的重要专辑榜单，对专辑进行分类。借此，我们为科学界与广大公众提供了量化工具，可用于区分流行专辑与具备文化或美学价值的艺术作品。 本文所提出的方法具备通用性，可推广至所有涉及创新与创意的领域。