Institutional context factors have a strong influence on career outcomes. For composers, having a composition admitted to a canon is a major event. Conceptualizing the canon as an institution, we can trace how canonization regulates, norms and culturally frames what kind of music is considered culturally valuable and consequently analyse the effect of canonization on the career success of contemporary composers. We study this effect for a specific musical canon, a list for wind orchestra competitions in Austria. Utilizing royalty data from the Austrian Wind Music Association, we find that canonization has a positive effect on the objective career success of composers. The results contribute to a nuanced understanding of institutional context factors, especially canonization, on the career success of artists and develops two new measures of objective career success – the performance of a composition and the repertoire.
