Using Network Science to Understand the Structure of Brazilian Popular Music

When it comes to music, everyone has an opinion. With Brazilian music is not different, people can be attached to certain songs because they remind them of special moments and places. Hence, it is hard to talk about how good a piece of music really is for a specific person. This paper delves into a controversial issue because it attempts to describe the music of a country (comprising of several sub-genres) and quantify the importance of musicians in that country using techniques rooted in Network Science. Brazilian music has been influenced by many cultures (as a result of the miscegenation in the history of Brazil) and has influenced many other styles of music, more prominently, Jazz. In this paper, we work with a large database of albums of Brazilian music and study the structure of collaborations between the musicians. Collaboration was modelled as a social network of musicians and then analyzed from different perspectives with the goal of describing the importance of musicians in a more scientific manner. We identified what we call the scaffolding of Brazilian music -- the fact that the network is maintained connected due to musicians that, although unknown to most of the population, are responsible for the connectedness of the network.