Original Music Album Diffusion Sustainability in Social Network-Based Communities: A Network Embedded Perspective

Abstract

An original music album is a collection of music created by an online musician, and is a special form of User Generated Content. This paper aims to identify the factors that drive original music album diffusion in online music community. Based on information acceptance theory and social networking, this study constructed a diffusion model of original music albums. To empirically test the theoretically driven hypotheses, the study uses two-stage data from albums and musicians from NetEase Music, one of the most popular online entertainment communities in China. The findings suggested that album created days, musician network degree, album subscription quantity, and album forward quantity had significant positive effects on diffusion sustainability. Musician network embedding had a significant positive effect on diffusion sustainability. There was an inverted u-shaped relationship between album music quantity and diffusion sustainability.