Innovation or deviation? The relationship between boundary crossing and audience evaluation in the music field

Prior research in organizations has shown that the spanning of distinct social categories usually leads to an unfavorable reaction from the audience. In the music field, however, a recombination of categories has long been celebrated as a major source of innovation. In this research, we conduct a systematical research on the effect of spanning behavior by musicians with a particular focus on the structural heterogeneity of categorical boundaries. We first ask whether the blending of distinct music genres is penalized in the music field, and then investigate how the outcomes of spanning behavior are differentiated by the structural characteristics of each genres. After collecting a comprehensive dataset of musicians in the United States from diverse sources including AllMusic, iTunes, and MusicBrainz, we construct a two-mode network of musicians and subgenres. In calculating musicians’ genre-spanning behavior, we suggest a new diversity metric by incorporating the affinity between genres. Our results suggest that genre-generalist musicians who combine distinct music genres are more likely to be devaluated by listeners compared to genre-specialists who adhere to a single genre. Moreover, we find that musicians tend to be more penalized when they blend genres that have nonporous boundaries rather than penetrable boundaries. This research expands our understanding of the conditions under which boundary crossing leads to negative audience evaluation.