Quantifying Disruptive Influence in the AllMusic Guide

Understanding how influences shape musical creation provides rich insight into cultural trends. As such, there have been several efforts to create quantitative complex network methods that support the analysis of influence networks among artists in a music corpus. We contribute to this body of work by examining how disruption happens in a corpus about music influence from the All Music Guide. A disruptive artist is one that creates a new stream of influences; this artist builds on prior efforts, but influences subsequent artists that do not build on the same prior efforts. We leverage methods devised to study disruption in Science and Technology, and apply them to the context of music creation. Our results point that such methods identify innovative artists, and that disruption is often uncorrelated with network centrality