Luck is considered to be a crucial ingredient to achieve impact in all creative domains, despite their diversity. For instance, in science, the movie industry, music, and art, the occurrence of the highest impact work and of a hot streak within a creative career are very difficult to predict. Are there domains that are more prone to luck than others? Here, we provide new insights on the role of randomness in impact in creative careers in two ways: (i) we systematically untangle luck and individual ability to generate impact in the movie, music, and book industries, and in science, and compare the luck factor between these fields; (ii) we show the limited predictive power of collaboration networks to predict career hits. Taken together, our analysis suggests that luck consistently affects career impact across all considered sectors and improves our understanding in pinpointing the key elements in the prediction of success.We compiled four data sets and individual careers across the movie, music, and book industries, and across scientific fields, covering overall 28 different types of creative domains:1. We mined the Internet Movie Database (IMDb [26]) and compiled a data set of 803,013 individuals in the movie industry working as movie directors, producers, art directors, soundtrack composers, and scriptwriters, altogether contributing to 1,297,275 movies.

We propose a bio-inspired, agent-based approach to describe the natural phenomenon of group chasing in both two and three dimensions. Using a set of local interaction rules we created a continuous-space and discrete-time model with time delay, external noise and limited acceleration. We implemented a unique collective chasing strategy, optimized its parameters and studied its properties when chasing a much faster, erratic escaper. We show that collective chasing strategies can significantly enhance the chasers' success rate. Our realistic approach handles group chasing within closed, soft boundaries-in contrast with the periodic ones in most published literature-and resembles several properties of pursuits observed in nature, such as emergent encircling or the escaper's zigzag motion.

The evolution of the art ecosystem is driven by largely invisible networks, defined by undocumented interactions between artists, institutions, collectors and curators. The emergence of cryptoart, and the NFT-based digital marketplace around it, offers unprecedented opportunities to examine the mechanisms that shape the evolution of networks that define artistic practice. Here we mapped the Foundation platform, identifying over 48,000 artworks through the associated NFTs listed by over 15,000 artists, allowing us to characterize the patterns that govern the networks that shape artistic success. We find that NFT adoption by both artists and collectors has undergone major changes, starting with a rapid growth that peaked in March 2021 and the emergence of a new equilibrium in June. Despite significant changes in activity, the average price of the sold art remained largely unchanged, with the price of an artist’s work fluctuating in a range that determines his or her reputation. The artist invitation network offers evidence of rich and poor artist clusters, driven by homophily, indicating that the newly invited artists develop similar engagement and sales patterns as the artist who invited them. We find that successful artists receive disproportional, repeated investment from a small group of collectors, underscoring the importance of artist–collector ties in the digital marketplace. These reproducible patterns allow us to characterize the features, mechanisms, and the networks enabling the success of individual artists, a quantification necessary to better understand the emerging NFT ecosystem.

While the emergence of success in creative professions, such as music, has been studied extensively, the link between individual success and collaboration is not yet fully uncovered. Here we aim to fill this gap by analyzing longitudinal data on the co-releasing and mentoring patterns of popular electronic music artists appearing in the annual Top 100 ranking of DJ Magazine. We find that while this ranking list of popularity publishes 100 names, only the top 20 is stable over time, showcasing a lock-in effect on the electronic music elite. Based on the temporal co-release network of top musicians, we extract a diverse community structure characterizing the electronic music industry. These groups of artists are temporally segregated, sequentially formed around leading musicians, and represent changes in musical genres. We show that a major driving force behind the formation of music communities is mentorship: around half of musicians entering the top 100 have been mentored by current leading figures before they entered the list. We also find that mentees are unlikely to break into the top 20, yet have much higher expected best ranks than those who were not mentored. This implies that mentorship 1 arXiv:1908.10968v2 [physics.soc-ph] 31 Oct 2019 helps rising talents, but becoming an all-time star requires more. Our results provide insights into the intertwined roles of success and collaboration in electronic music, highlighting the mechanisms shaping the formation and landscape of artistic elites in electronic music.

Do only major scientific breakthroughs hit the news and social media, or does a 'catchy' title help to attract public attention? How strong is the connection between the importance of a scientific paper and the (social) media attention it receives? In this study we investigate these questions by analysing the relationship between the observed attention and certain characteristics of scientific papers from two major multidisciplinary journals: Nature Communication (NC) and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). We describe papers by features based on the linguistic properties of their titles and centrality measures of their authors in their co-authorship network. We identify linguistic features and collaboration patterns that might be indicators for future attention, and are characteristic to different journals, research disciplines, and media sources.