The antecedents of remix

Abstract

Reuse of the works of others has become common practice on the Internet and has formed the basis for collaboration in some online communities. However, some works are reused much more frequently than others. In this article we build a quantitative model that explains which factors are most salient in determining the likelihood that an author's work will be reused. Controlling for common factors, such as the work's popularity, we show that the probability of reuse depends on (a) the degree of derivativity of the work in question, (b) the specific ways in which it derives meaning from other works (intertextuality), (c) the audience's preferential attachment to authors of high fecundity, and (d) the author's social embeddedness in networks of reuse. We use trace data from an online community that was built for the purpose of demonstrating the ability of open sharing and reuse to spur collaboration and innovation in music. Although our model is designed for broad applicability, we explain that the size and direction of the effects reported in this paper may vary, when reuse is performed with other media or for different purposes. Copyright © 2014 ACM.