The featuring phenomenon in music; how artists' voice characteristics effect success

The number of songs with featured artists and their success in making it in the charts have significantly increased with the digital music revolution. The voice characteristics of the original and featuring artists as well as their combinatorial effect have the potential to drive success of the songs with featured artists. In this project, we will analyze the how song success (defined as appearance in Top charts, time in top charts, number of downloads, etc) is driven by voice characteristics (timbre, pitch, range, etc) of both the original and the featuring artist. The underlying psychological mechanism of liking of certain song characteristics by the listerners will also be analyzed.