Variety and Superstardom in Popular Music

Abstract

The recording industry for popular singers, 1955–1987, consisted of a lower‐end market for singles and a higher‐end market for albums. The singles market acted as an entry‐level quality filter for the album market. While this two‐tier market system might have led to the “superstar phenomenon” in the Marshall‐Rosen sense, other non‐quality factors, such as the singer's race or musical style, resulted in an imperfect quality filter, possibly explaining why the industry did not exhibit superstardom statistically.

The Performance of German Motion Pictures, Profits and Subsidies: Some Empirical Evidence

“…On the supply side, we find scale economies of joint consumption. As with Hamlen (1991), the log-linear specification is also supported by the Box-Cox transformation technique, which can be regarded as one approach to letting the data determine the most appropriate functional form. 14 Finally, the loglinear formulation allows us to investigate Rosen's (1981) superstar phenomenon, because it yields regression coefficients that provide elasticities.…”

“…We apply a log-linear model of demand that ensures a broad description of the determinants of German motion picture performance. The specification of our model is based on the Dixit and Stiglitz (1977) model of monopolistic competition, as specified by Hamlen (1991) and Hamlen (1994) in the context of an empirical analysis of Rosen's (1981) superstar phenomenon in the record market. Within this framework, the demand for record relationship with a vector of general and qualityattributes of the records (Hamlen, 1991, p. 730;1994, p. 398).…”

Influences on sponsorship deals in NASCAR: indirect evidence from time on camera

“…Knowing that multiple mediocre performances do not add up to the quality found in one great performance (Rosen 1981) magnifies the importance of finding these superstars. Hamlen (1991Hamlen ( , 1994 and Kruger (2005) analyze this in vocal musical talent and Franck and Nüesch (2010) analyze both talent and popularity in German soccer to see what it takes to be a superstar. Our data provide a unique opportunity to study the value of both performance and celebrity on superstar status by analyzing NASCAR drivers.…”

A Model of Progressive Employee Compensation and Superstardom

“…He motivated the theory by describing how Alfred Marshall [3] was concerned with the distributional effects of a progressive salary structure with respect to ability, particularly at the upper tail of the distribution for ability. The superstar concept has been applied to various economic situations in the entertainment industry, e.g., Scully [4], Jones and Walsh [5], Hamlen [6,7], Chung and Cox [8] and Lucifora and Simmons [9].…”