Commentary on “Play It Again, Sam? Reference-Point Formation and Product Differentiation in the Music Industry”

With 30-odd years in the fashion/luxury industry and at the helm of houses like Roberto Cavalli, Dsquared2, and Hogan, I have always pondered whether it is more rewarding to innovate or to stay the same, to keep proposing something that the already captive audience knows and loves, or to explore different paths. Big name fashion houses like Dior, Balenciaga, and Saint Laurent are very different from their namesake’s creation and have enjoyed tremendous success, but at the same time brands like Loro Piana, Prada, Tod’s, and Brunello Cucinelli have not only stuck to their original proposition but also insisted upon it, again with success.

This is the very tension that most professional artists—musicians, filmmakers, novelists, and fashion designers—constantly face.

With this question, I came across this very interesting study where Professors Deshmane and Martínez-de-Albéniz used rich, large-scale data from the music industry—some 39,000 albums across the careers of 4,000 artists, pairing audio data from streaming platforms with radio play logs from 26 countries and top critics reviews—to try and find an answer (Deshmane and Martínez-de-Albéniz 2025).

Their research shows that audiences don’t judge new music in isolation, but they rely on three different mental “reference points”: (a) comparison with the artist’s past work, (b) comparison with similar artists, and (c) comparison with popular chart hits.

Here I find strong similarities with the luxury market: (a) a brand’s products always get compared with previous collection, (b) brands fall in particular “buckets” of reference with similar brands (think Cavalli, Versace, and Dolce & Gabbana for their outspoken lifestyle, or brands like Cucinelli, Loro Piana, and Zegna that are the stalwarts of “quiet luxury”), and (c) brands are in fashion or not and therefore enjoy more or less exposure, both in traditional and in social media.

The paper further shows that different audiences respond to these reference points in different ways: radio stations, the commercial guardians of mass music consumption, focus on broad appeal and retaining listeners and favor continuity, while critics, who play a crucial role in shaping cultural legitimacy and influence tastemakers, awards, and long-term artistic reputations, love transformation and consistently reward bold departures from an artist’s past, valuing originality and evolution over conformity. The study also reveals that artists can manage these tensions. Genre labels, which are subjective and shaped by cultural perceptions, are powerful framing tools. By changing a genre label, artists can experiment but keep their listeners happy, avoiding the commercial risks of straying from the familiar. And career timing matters––established artists have more freedom to explore.

I found these results very insightful from a luxury/fashion perspective: mutatis mutandis, multibrand stores and department stores are very much in line with radio stations, privileging “safer” choices in their buying over betting on something new and therefore risky. By contrast, fashion magazines and journalists constantly crave for something new and cherish change, much like music critics. Fashion designers, artists themselves, often seek new paths by designing products that stray from their own ordinary production: I know ready-to-wear designers that started creating porcelain works, or shoe designers that are intrigued by reimagining popular electronic devices, just to give some examples.

This research sheds light on a timeless creative challenge: how far to evolve, when to take the leap, and the audience. And these insights reach beyond music, offering useful guiding principles in dealing with stakeholders that have inherently different preferences regarding continuity and transformation and helpful framing tools that can be used to manage these tensions to any creator navigating a world of limited attention, high expectations, and constant comparison.