The EconomistFebruary 3rd 2018 Business 571F
EW who have given an address at Har-
vard Business School have a CVlike that
of Khaled Mohamed Khaled, who spoke
there in 2016. The 42-year-old music pro-
ducer began his career as a record-store
clerk and radio host. TodayDJKhaled, as
he is known to fans, is one of the world’s
most successful hip-hop artists. Although
critics may disagree on the merits of Mr
Khaled’smusic, his selling strategy—bring-
ing together the hottest pop stars of the mo-
ment—is worthy of any business-school
classroom. America’smusic industry is in-
creasingly following his formula.
Collaborations like those assembled by
Mr Khaled are nothing new. Ever since the
hip-hop group Run-DMCteamed up with
Aerosmith, a rock band, to record “Walk
This Way” in 1986, record labels have recog-
nised that combining the fan bases of mul-
tiple artists can be a boon to record sales.
The practice has spread. According to data
from the BillboardHot 100, a weekly rank-
ing of the most popular singles in America,
collaborations now represent more than a
third of hit songs (see chart). Of the top ten
songs on the current Hot 100 chart, half are
credited to more than one artist.
Many of them are songwriters. Today’s
pop songs are manufactured by an assem-
bly line of writers and producers, in what
Larry Miller, director of New York Univer-
sity’s Steinhardt Music Business Pro-
gramme, calls an “industrial song-writing
machine”. It takes an average of nearly four
songwriters to craft a hit song, up from two
in the 1980s. Bruno Mars’s “That’s What I
Like”, which was named song of the year at
the 60th annual Grammy awards on Janu-
ary 28th, credits no fewer than eight.
Hip-hop’s growing influence has mean-
while brought more guest artists into the
recording studio. Nielsen, a market-re-
search firm, callsR&B/hip-hop America’s
most popular genre. It has a culture of col-
laboration. The best representation of this
might be the “posse cut”, a style of song in
which as many as half a dozen rappers take
turns delivering a verse. Hip-hop artists
continue to collaborate at higher rates than
peers. Hit Songs Deconstructed, a music-
analytics firm, estimates that 64% of hip-
hop tracks that reached the Billboardtop
ten in 2017 featured more than one artist,
compared with 40% of pop songs.
Streaming services may also be encour-
aging popular artists to jump on each oth-
ers’ tracks. Although radio stations remain
highly segregated, based on what NateSloan, a musicologist and co-host of the
“Switched on Pop” podcast, calls “mostly
fictitious categories devised by marketing
executives”, services like Spotify and Ap-
ple Music blur the lines between genres. A
Spotify user who searches, for example, for
Kendrick Lamar, a hip-hop artist, may find
tracks featuring Maroon 5 and Imagine
Dragons, groups rarely heard on conven-
tional hip-hop radio stations.
It may be tempting to dismiss DJ
Khaled-style pop songs as contrived and
inauthentic. But new research suggests
that listeners are attracted to the familiar
yet distinctive sound often found in collab-
orative tracks. Using a database of nearly
27,000 songs that appeared on the Bill-
boardHot 100 charts between 1958 and
2016, Noah Askin ofINSEAD, a French busi-
ness school, and Michael Mauskapf of Co-
lumbia Business School find that the most
successful songs tend to be different but
not too different, a sweet spot the authors
refer to as “optimal differentiation”. Col-
laborations that combine a familiar artist
with a newcomer, or a mainstream act
with an edgier one, may yield precisely the
kind of music thatlisteners want. 7The music businessBanding together
Collaborations are becoming ever more
common in popular musicDJ Khaled has some wild thoughtsNo small feat.Sources: Ultimate Music Database; The EconomistShare of monthly Billboard Hot 100 songs
that are collaborations, %1960 70 80 90 2000 10 1701020304050P
AKISTAN’s enormous mineral wealth
has long lain untapped. Since a 1992 geo-
logical survey spotted one of the world’s
largest coal reserves in Thar, a scrubby des-
ert in the southern province of Sindh, pros-
pectors have hardly dug up a lump. Among
those to flounder is a national hero. Samar
Mubarakmand, feted for his role in Paki-
stan’s nuclear-weapons programme, has
just shut the coal-gasification company he
founded in 2010, when he vowed on live
television to crack Thar.
Environmentalists, many from abroad,
argue the reserve’s 175bn-ton bounty
should remain underground. They point
out the coal is lignite—dirty, poor-quality
stuff that, in adding to carbon emissions,
increases the risk of climate change for
Pakistan. Other critics note that by locking
itself into coal, Pakistan may miss out on
the plummeting price of solar energy.
To such qualms, the government offers
three rejoinders. First, severe power short-
ages have long blighted the nation, and re-
newable sources cannot offer the daylong,
year-round power it needs. Second, coal
accounts for less than 1% of current genera-
tion, compared with 70% in neighbouring
India and China. And third, domestic coal
would allow the country to forgo expen-
sive imports of the fuel for newly built
power stations, a drain on fast-dwindling
foreign-exchange reserves.
Enter Engro, Pakistan’s largest private-
sector conglomerate. The firm’s reputation
as a canny risk-taker dates to 1991, when
employees bought out its parent company,
Exxon, an American energy giant, in the
first transaction of its kind in Pakistan. To-
day, as is common, a single family—the Da-
wood clan—has a controlling stake. But it
has not lost what analysts describe as its
“saviour complex”, a desire to address na-
tional shortcomings through managerial
talent and a balance-sheet plumped by
sales of $633m-worth of stakes in its fertil-
iser-and-food businesses in 2016. Lately
that has meant a redoubled focus on ener-
gy and in particular on the puzzle of Thar.
Eight years ago Engro bought the rights
to one of Thar’s 13 blocks, containing 1% of
the reserve (more than enough given the
gargantuan size of the mine). To work on
extraction, it formed the country’sbiggest
ever public-private partnership, the Sindh
Engro Coal Mining Company (SECMC), in
which Engro digs and the state provides in-
frastructure. Relying on the state can break
strong firms. Engro itself almost wentEngroThar’s coal in the
desert
ISLAMABAD
Pakistan’s biggest private-sector firm is
betting on a fabled coal mine