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VARIETY AND SUPERSTARDOM IN POPULAR MUSIC
Author(s) -
Hamlen William A.
Publication year - 1994
Publication title -
economic inquiry
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.823
H-Index - 72
eISSN - 1465-7295
pISSN - 0095-2583
DOI - 10.1111/j.1465-7295.1994.tb01338.x
Subject(s) - superstar , quality (philosophy) , economics , musical , variety (cybernetics) , imperfect , filter (signal processing) , music industry , style (visual arts) , advertising , business , art , visual arts , computer science , linguistics , epistemology , computer vision , music education , artificial intelligence , philosophy
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.