Hot Streaks in the Brazilian Music Market: A Comparison Between Physical and Digital Eras

Consuming music through streams has made huge volumes of data available. We collect a part of such data and perform cross-era comparative analyses between physical and digital media for successful artists within the music market in Brazil. Given an artist’s career, we focus on hot streak periods defined as high-impact bursts occurring in sequence. Specifically, we construct artists’ success time series to detect and characterize hot streak periods for both physical and digital eras. Then, we assess their features, analyze them in the genre scale, and perform a cluster analysis to identify groups of artists with distinct success levels. For both physical and digital eras, we find the same clusters: Spike Hit Artists, Big Hit Artists, and Top Hit Artists. Our insights shed light on significant changes in the dynamics of the music industry over the years, by identifying the core of each era.