Figure 4

Growth of the composer network and its relation to Heaps’ and Zipf’s laws. (A) The number of composers grows sublinearly as a function of the number of edges in the network, indicating that newly-created edges are increasingly attached to pre-existing composers. (B) As the network grows the rank-frequency plots of the bipartite degree ranks also more clearly follow the Zipf’s law, \(P(r) \sim r^{-b}\) with \(b=1.13 \pm0.03\) (solid line). This is consistent with the correlation between Heaps’ law and Zipf’s law [46].