It's much, much harder to compile a dataset that captures the path of music _influence_ as a way to measure it's impact. Yet, I wonder if that would look at all different? Consider the impact that one Giorgio Moroder had on electronic music globally, both in terms of "Italo Disco" and more. He's clearly in the article's illustrations _somewhere_, but as a solo artist and producer, may have few if any connections (collaborations & credits) to other Italian groups.
[1] https://medium.com/festival-peak/exploring-the-post-rock-wor...
For example, The Cure was exclusively signed to Fiction Records, which was more or less a vanity press for them, but they indeed had labelmates who were really, really obscure, and could always be connected back to Cure personnel.
It was sort of an amazing feeling, that everything was really interconnected in unexpected ways. In hindsight, all that music was a terrible influence and I was wasting time and money, but I also learned quite a bit about the record industry and collectibles, such as how to appraise the value of a piece, detect counterfeits vs. authentic pieces, and methods for archiving and preservation. My parents had collected postcards, stamps and other ephemera, and it sort of rubbed off on me!
I would imagine that influence could be transferred even without artists playing in each other's bands. I can think of plenty of extremely influential bands that defined the start of a whole genre, whose members never played in another band.
But perhaps the original argument that the author was making was that Maroccolo is important because he played with everyone, in which case this analysis makes sense.
Anyway, cool networks.