The costliest signals of authenticity? How iconic deaths transform audience reception in hip-hop

• Main Author: Ma, Xiangyu
• Other Authors: School of Social Sciences
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: 2025
• Subjects: Social Sciences; Authenticity; Death
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/182078
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

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.