Awards are an integral part of the culture industry.

Filmmakers hope for the Bavarian Film Prize or an Academy Award, musicians for the German Record Critics' Prize or a Grammy.

What these awards have in common is that they are based on jury decisions or surveys of critics and colleagues.

A prize awarded by the public or determined on the basis of sales figures, such as the "golden record", is also a nice thing, but it only proves that the amateurs have found it popular, which some experts even consider disreputable.

Even in pop music, the highest consecrations are reserved for those who are no longer dependent on public success.

That's why David Bowie is considered a pillar saint of pop, while Helene Fischer is less so.

This leads to the question of what those who enjoy or at least come close to enjoying such appreciation during their lifetime actually make of it.

Are they resting on their laurels?

Are they trying to replicate their success using the tried and true recipes?

Or do they take the opportunity to try something new?

The authors of a recently published study assumed the latter and used data on the musical development of Grammy Award winners to check it.

In contrast to other analyzes that deal primarily with the prerequisites for artistic success, they were concerned with its consequences: Does a Grammy influence one's further musical career and production in such a way that it promotes more creativity and thus deviation from the average?

Award winners are given more freedom and resources

The albums of Grammy Award winners and nominees from 1959 to 2018 were used to answer the question.

The style and genre assignments of their works were taken into account as characteristics of the artistic development, but also their content: in cooperation with a streaming provider, the digitally available albums could be provided with an acoustic "fingerprint" that integrates characteristics such as tempo, instrumentality and danceability .

On this basis, an artificial neural network was used to develop a model that numerically expresses the distance between individual music albums.

In this way, it is possible to calculate how close a new album is to all previous albums in the same genre, and thus how conventional or innovative it is.

This showed that there are no significant differences between nominees and winners before the decision is made.

It is therefore a field that is already relatively homogeneous in terms of artistic quality and differentiation.

The more interesting question is whether the profit makes a difference.

In fact, the Grammy winners are characterized by the fact that they differ more from the existing ones in later albums, i.e. they show more courage to be creative.

Matthew Effect of Grammy Success

Among other things, this has to do with the fact that the record companies now generally give them more freedom and resources: Their productions tend to be more complex.

This seems justified by a certain Matthew effect of the Grammy success: the following albums are also more successful in the charts.

In contrast, the nominees who went empty tend to go on to release less innovative albums that are more stylistically similar to the work of other artists than before.

The near success does not seem to encourage further creative efforts, but rather to orientate oneself to apparently proven recipes for success.

The positive result for the music industry, that consecration stimulates creativity, has a price: below the few winners, the award ceremony tends to lead to an adjustment to the average.

So maybe it would be better to forego nominations.

In addition, the creative bonus is lower the more successful an artist was before winning the Grammy.

That innovations can alienate a loyal audience has been known since the resentment that Bob Dylan provoked when he picked up the unfamiliar electric guitar at the 1965 Newport Festival.

With an award behind you, it's easier to step away from the mainstream.

However, defying the possible headwind requires an artistic stubbornness that can sometimes do without the approval of the audience.