Over the last 30 years, there has been an increasing tendency for artists to collaborate with ‘feature’ artists on one-off song projects. Although there might be purely artistic reasons for such collaborations, it is not clear a priori if there are also economic returns in terms of increased demand. Furthermore, if there is evidence of increased demand, the natural question becomes whether the mechanism is through a ‘quality’ or ‘promotion’ channel, or a combination thereof. Using weekly US Spotify streaming data from 2017–2018, we investigate these questions. We exploit the fact that many artists in our sample sometimes work alone and sometimes work with feature artists. Additionally, we also exploit the fact that many artists work with multiple features artists, which allows us to examine how (observed) feature artist characteristics affect demand. We find that songs featuring other artists generally outperform songs without feature artists, although there are a number of caveats with respect to the characteristics of the artists involved. Although we do not entirely rule out a quality effect, we conjecture a promotion effect is the primary channel explaining our main result.

中文翻译：

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需要两个，宝贝！特色艺术家合作和音乐流媒体需求

在过去的 30 年里，艺术家与“特色”艺术家合作完成一次性歌曲项目的趋势越来越明显。尽管此类合作可能纯粹出于艺术原因，但在需求增加方面是否也有经济回报尚不清楚。此外，如果有证据表明需求增加，自然的问题就变成了该机制是通过“质量”还是“促销”渠道，还是两者的结合。我们使用 2017 年至 2018 年的每周美国 Spotify 流数据来调查这些问题。我们利用样本中的许多艺术家有时单独工作，有时与特色艺术家合作这一事实。此外，我们还利用了许多艺术家与多位艺术家合作的事实，这使我们能够检查（观察到的）特色艺术家特征如何影响需求。我们发现以其他艺术家为特色的歌曲通常比没有特色艺术家的歌曲表现得更好，尽管对于所涉及的艺术家的特征有一些警告。虽然我们不完全排除质量效应，但我们推测促销效应是解释我们主要结果的主要渠道。