The costliest signals of authenticity? How iconic deaths transform audience reception in hip-hop
The death of an artist can act as a costly signal of their authenticity, and cause enduring changes in audience valuations of their work. Drawing on novel digital trace data of audience evaluations from a major online music community, we show how the death of an hip-hop artist induces improvements t...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
2025
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| Online Access: | https://hdl.handle.net/10356/182078 |
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| Institution: | Nanyang Technological University |
| Language: | English |
| Summary: | The death of an artist can act as a costly signal of their authenticity, and cause enduring changes in audience valuations of their work. Drawing on novel digital trace data of audience evaluations from a major online music community, we show how the death of an hip-hop artist induces improvements to the valuations of their antemortem work. Such death-induced changes to audience valuations are mediated by the ability of some deaths – what we term iconic deaths – to act as costly signals of an artist's authenticity. Iconic deaths that better signal authenticity produce greater death-induced improvements in audience valuations. Such costly signaling effects are more salient within discredited subgenres of hip-hop. We show how this is robust to complementary explanations, such as sympathetic eulogizing or audience expansion effects. |
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