The Economics of Real Superstars:
The Market for Rock Concerts in the Material World
Alan B. Krueger
Princeton University and NBER
April 12, 2004
Like others, I get by with a little help from my friends. This time I thank Gary
Bongiovanni, James Grier, Lowell Milken, Orley Ashenfelter, Susan Athey and Bobby
Willig for particularly helpful discussions, and Arul Karttikeya, Lauren Sun, Grace Wong
and Brad Wynne for excellent research assistance. I have also benefited from comments
from seminar participants at Princeton, the OECD and Columbia. All mistakes are my
own. An unwritten version of this paper was presented as the keynote speech at the
Society of Labor Economists’ Annual Meeting in Baltimore, MD, May 4, 2002. I would
like to dedicate this paper to the memory of Sherwin Rosen, who was the father of the
economics of superstars and a superstar in his own right.
ABSTRACT
The Economics of Real Superstars:
The Market for Rock Concerts in the Material World
Beginning in 1997, the price of concert tickets took off, and ticket sales and the number
of concerts performed by top artists declined. From 1996 to 2003, for example, the
average concert price increased by 82 percent while the CPI increased by just 17 percent.
This paper summarizes and seeks to understand trends in the concert industry from 1981
to 2003. Explanations that are examined include: 1) the possible crowding out of the
secondary ticket market; 2) rising superstar effects; 3) Baumol and Bowen’s disease; 4)
increased concentration of concert promoters; and 5) the erosion of complementarities
between concerts and album sales because of file sharing and CD copying. The paper
tentatively concludes that the decline in complementarities between concerts and album
sales is the main cause of the recent surge in concert prices and decline in ticket sales.
Alan B. Krueger
Industrial Relations Section
Firestone Library
Princeton University
Princeton, NJ 08544
(609) 258-4046
There are two possible approaches one can take to delivering a keynote lunch
speech like this one. One approach is to present a serious paper with serious overtones,
like one would present at a regular university seminar. The other is to provide
entertainment, as one is competing with lunch-time chatter and the clanging of coffee
cups. I will try to create a convex combination of the two: a talk on an entertaining
subject with a serious message. I should also mention parenthetically that this subject
makes for a great undergraduate lecture. Few subjects are of more intrinsic interest to
students than popular music. So one reason to pay attention is that you can painlessly
teach your students some basic economics by downloading the Powerpoint slides (replete
with music clips) from my lecture from www.irs.princeton.edu.
Before I start I owe you an explanation. How did I become interested in this
topic? The truth is that about a year ago, I accidentally fell into it. After I wrote an
article for the New York Times called, “Seven Lessons from Super Bowl Tickets,” I was
invited to give the keynote speech at the Concert Industry Consortium in Hollywood, CA
in February 2002. I explained to the organizer that I knew very little about the economics
of rock & roll concerts. In fact, I explained that the only time I had gone to a concert in
the last several years was when I took my children to see *NSYNC, and the only thing I
learned from that experience was that I should bring ear plugs if I ever go to another
concert! He assured me not to worry. His organization, Pollstar, had collected a
database on more than 200,000 concerts dating back to 1981, and they would be happy to
share it with me. This naturally peaked my interest to study the economics of rock &
2
roll, a subfield of economics I now call Rockonomics.1
In case anyone believes that the music industry is only about art and has nothing
to do with economics, consider the following quotations from two well-known Paul’s
(quoted from Eliot, 1993, p. viii):
“Somebody said to me, ‘But the Beatles were antimaterialistic.’ That’s a
huge myth. John and I literally used to sit down and say, ‘Now, let’s write
a swimming pool.’”
Paul McCartney
“The fact of the matter is that popular music is one of the industries of the
country. It’s all completely tied up with capitalism. It’s stupid to separate
it.”
Paul Simon
Of course, many do think that rock & roll is more than just an industry. For
example, that great New Jersey native, Bruce Springsteen, once remarked, “[I]n some
fashion, I help people hold on to their own humanity, if I'm doing my job right." And
undoubtedly he is correct that music can produce positive externalities. In addition,
many artists and their agents may have grander objectives than income maximization.
Springsteen, for example, sets his ticket prices well below their market value. And Tom
Petty recently commented, “We don’t do the Golden Circle/VIP thing. I don’t see how
carving out the best seats and charging a lot more for them has anything to do with rock
& roll.”2
It is nevertheless unavoidable that fundamental economic forces – supply,
demand, market structure, and technology – profoundly shape the music industry.
1
To my chagrin, the musicologist James Grier pointed out to me that Marc Eliot had already written a book
titled, Rockonomics: The Money Behind the Music in 1989 (2nd
edition published in 1993). Eliot’s book,
however, is mainly about the sordid business deals in the industry, not economics.
2
Quoted from Wild (2002).
3
As documented further below, the rock & roll industry has undergone profound
economic changes in recent years. After growing mildly faster than overall consumer
price inflation – and in unison with other entertainment events – the price of concert
tickets exploded from 1996 to 2003. The average ticket price increased 82 percent from
1996 to 2003, while the CPI increased 17 percent. Moreover, the number of tickets sold,
fraction of seats in the venue sold, and number of shows performed by star performers
have all trended slowly downward for more than a decade. These trends are consistent
with the industry becoming more monopolized. The question is, why?
In principle, an economic analysis of rock & roll concerts should be
straightforward with standard tools. Tickets should be priced to maximize profits over
the relevant horizon, taking into account any effects on the sale of complementary goods,
such as merchandise and record sales (see Rosen and Rosenfield, 1997). A concert is an
experience good, as consumers do not know the utility they would derive from a concert
unless they go to it. As a result, image and reputation are very important.
Rock & roll music is also a quintessential market in which to apply the economics
of superstars. As shown below, concert revenue became much more skewed in the 1980s
and 1990s. But the economics of superstars can only take you so far in understanding
why prices and revenues for superstar musicians have soared the last five years. To fully
understand the market for rock & roll stars, one needs to link Industrial Organization to
the market. This is the serious theme of my talk, and I would make it more general: to
understand labor markets, Labor Economists need to be more attentive to industry
structure, technology, product market rents, and managerial incentives.
4
I. Contractual Arrangements
The market for rock & roll musicians has many players and complex contracts.
First, of course, are the musicians, who form a band. The bands have managers who
represent them and take a share of their earnings in exchange for their managerial
services. Bands make contracts with promoters to promote live concerts. Successful
bands also have contracts with recording companies to produce and market albums.
Record companies could also be involved in promoting concert tours, but I have the sense
that this is becoming increasingly unlikely, and was probably never very common.
Contractual arrangements between bands and promoters are heterogeneous, but
the typical contract resembles a book contract, with an advance and royalties if sales
exceed a certain level. The typical contract is most easily illustrated with a hypothetical
example. Suppose the band Angrist’s Instruments (AI) contracts with Ron’s Promotions
to perform a single concert. AI receives a “guaranteed advance” – e.g., equal to the first
$100,000 of ticket sales, and then, before additional revenue is distributed, the promoter,
Ron, recovers his expenses and a “guaranteed profit” – say $50,000 for expenses and
$22,500 for profit. The expenses could include advertising, rent for the venue, costs of
unloading the equipment, etc. The promoter and the band then split any ticket revenue
above the guarantee plus expenses and minimum profit (above $172,500 in this case),
usually with the band receiving 85 percent and the promoter receiving 15 percent of these
revenues.3
This arrangement probably describes around three quarters of contracts. The
band’s guaranteed advance and percent of revenue after expenses is higher for bands with
greater bargaining power.
3
These hypothetical figures were used by the head of a major management firm to illustrate to me how the
“typical” contract is designed.
5
In the negotiation, the band (or its manager) agrees to the concert price, which
naturally affects the amount of revenue collected.4
In addition, the band usually receives
100 percent of merchandise sales (e.g., T-shirts) that take place at the concert.5
The
venue usually receives the beer and parking revenue. A manager of several prominent
bands told me that the merchandise revenue a band receives equals roughly 25 percent of
ticket sales -- which is convenient because I only have data on ticket revenue, and I don’t
know how the revenue is divided between the promoter and the band. Nonetheless, if
merchandise sales approximately equal a quarter of ticket revenue, then ticket revenue is
approximately equal to the income the band receives from the concert.
In various combinations, tickets are distributed by a ticket broker (e.g.,
Ticketmaster), the venue’s box office, and, in some cases, directly by the band to its fan
club.
Record companies tend to sign long-term agreements with bands that specify an
advance on royalties and a royalty rate. The typical band has very little negotiating
power with record labels, and the advance may not cover much more than the recording
costs, which are often charged to the band. Caves (2000; p. 61) comments that “casual
evidence suggests that roughly 80 percent of albums and 85 percent of singles released
fail to cover their costs.” Because fixed recording costs vary little with band quality, only
the most popular artists earn substantial revenue from album sales.
Caves (2000) analyzes the contractual arrangements in the music industry in
terms of the efficient division of risk, incentives and rewards. He emphasizes that
4
This is apparently news to some musicians. David Crosby, for example, told a reporter for the Dallas
Morning News, “The ticket price isn't up to us, man.” Quoted in Christensen (2002).
5
Sometimes the band will be required to give a proportion (e.g., 30 percent) of the merchandise sales to the
venue for the right to sell there, however.
6
reputation and the prospect of repeated contracts are essential for contract enforcement.
Eliot (1993) emphasizes that malfeasance is common in music contracts. Caves notes
that, “From the artist’s viewpoint, a problem of moral hazard arises because the label
keeps the books that determine the earnings remitted to the artist.”
An analogous problem arises with live concerts. The following remark by Sharon
Osbourne (2002; p. 56) underscores the difficulty of contract enforcement in the concert
industry: “My husband’s whole career, people stole from him. They walk off with
thousands of dollars that’s yours. So the only way, unfortunately, for me is to get nasty
and to get violent. At least you feel better.” Caves argues that contract enforcement in
this industry relies heavily on repeated transactions among parties who value their
reputations. There is also the Osbourne contract enforcement mechanism.
II. Data
The main source of data used in this paper is Pollstar’s Boxoffice Report
database. Pollstar is the trade magazine of the concert industry, broadly defined. Since
1981, the magazine has collected and published data on concert revenue, venue capacity,
ticket sales and prices. The data are provided voluntarily by venue managers to Pollstar.
(The Boxoffice Report Form is available from www.pollstaronline.com/report.asp.)
Venues have an incentive to report their data because Pollstar disseminates the
information to potential clients. Managers report data on a wide range of musical
concerts, and occasionally on other entertainment events, such as comedians, professional
wrestling matches and traveling Broadway shows. The data are most complete for
concerts, and an effort was made to exclude the non-concerts from the sample. Before
7
restrictions, the database contains 260,081 box office reports. After eliminating
non-concerts, benefit concerts, and events that occurred outside the United States, the
sample contains 232,911 reports.6
A report could pertain to multiple performances in the
same venue. Thus, the 232,911 reports encompass 270,679 separate performances.
Reporting of concerts to Pollstar increased substantially in the 1980s, so one
potential problem is that the dataset may not be representative of the entire concert
industry in all years. Major acts are more likely to be included in the dataset. As a
partial adjustment for changes in sample composition, in much of the analysis I restrict
the sample to artists listed in The Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll, hereafter
called Encyclopedia bands. This Encyclopedia contains information on 1,786 artists, and
1,275 of these artists performed at least one concert represented in the Pollstar database.7
The edition of the Encyclopedia I use was published in October 2001; two earlier editions
were published in 1984 and 1995. Thus, the Encyclopedia contains something of a
moving average of the leading bands in the period under study, which produces more of a
consistent sample. Bands listed in the Encyclopedia are responsible for 75 percent of the
dollar value of ticket sales in the Pollstar data from 1981 to 2003. I suspect that the
representation of concerts in the Pollstar database is greater and more consistent over
time for artists included in the Encyclopedia than for all bands.
To supplement the Pollstar database, I collected information from the
Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll on the year each band was formed, the gender of the
performers (male, female, mixed), the genre of music, and a novel measure of the
“prominence” of the band – the number of millimeters written about the band in the
6
Despite my efforts, it is possible that some of the remaining reports do not pertain to concerts. This is not
an issue, however, when the sample is restricted to bands listed in the Rolling Stone Encyclopedia.
8
Encyclopedia.8
This information was coded and then merged on to the Pollstar database,
so another advantage of limiting the sample to Encyclopedia bands is that additional
information is available.
Two other limitations of the data should be noted. First, the ticket price and
revenue pertain to the list price. Any service fees charged by the ticket distributor are
excluded. Because service fees have been grown rapidly in recent years, this omission
probably serves to understate the acceleration in ticket prices in recent years. Second, I
do not have information on secondary market, and it might be common for tickets to be
resold in a scalper market. Nevertheless, the list price, not the resale price, is relevant
from the standpoint of artists and promoters, as their ticket revenue is derived from
tickets sold at the list price. Moreover, fragmentary evidence summarized below
suggests that scalping is a less common phenomenon than widely believed.
III. Trends in Prices, Ticket Sales, and Revenues
Figure 1 displays the average price of a concert ticket (total revenue divided by
total tickets sold each year) for all concerts from 1981 to 2003, and the (ticket-weighted)
average high and low price of a concert ticket. The figure also shows what the average
price would have been had it grown in lockstep with the CPI-U. From 1981 to 1996
concert prices grew slightly faster than inflation: concert prices grew a compound 4.6
percent per year while overall consumer prices grew 3.7 percent per year. From 1996 to
2003, concert prices grew much faster than inflation: 8.9 percent a year versus 2.3
percent a year. (While many economists believe that the CPI overstates the rise in cost of
7
Some of the artist were deceased or retired before the Pollstar database was started.
8
In some cases, this information was drawn from the VH1 Encyclopedia.
9
living because of unmeasured quality improvements, hardly any economist I know
believes the quality of rock & roll music has improved.) And if the sample of concerts is
limited to those performed by bands listed in the Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll in an
attempt to hold constant changes in composition and quality, the acceleration in concert
prices after 1996 is slightly greater: 11.1 percent a year growth from 1996 to 2003 versus
4.9 percent a year in the 1981-96 period.
The cost of the highest priced ticket in the house has grown even faster than the
average ticket (see the top dashed line in Figure 1). Weighted by total ticket sales, the
average high price ticket grew by 10.7 percent per annum from 1996 to 2003, while the
average of the lowest price ticket grew by 6.7 percent a year. Thus, price dispersion
increased across seats for the same concert.
To formally check on the impact of composition effects on the average price, I
computed a Fisher Ideal price index using the artist as the unit of observation. The
weights were updated each year. The Fisher index indicated growth of 8.2 percent per
annum in the post-1996 period, so composition changes cannot account for the observed
rapid price growth.
Figure 2 provides a related and more entertaining look at composition effects.
The chart shows average concert ticket prices (total revenue divided by tickets sold) for
10 selected artists in years in which they gave concerts. The artists were all well
established by the 1980s – what my students call dinosaur groups -- so there is no
concern about increased popularity affecting their prices in the late 1990s. With the
exception of Garth Brooks, who makes a point of keeping his concert prices low (and
gives relatively few concerts), all of the bands’ prices took off after the mid 1990s.
10
Again, there is little evidence that a shift in composition is responsible for the price
acceleration. For the same, well-established artists, prices grew much faster than overall
price inflation after the mid 1990s.
Instead of the overall price inflation rate, probably a more appropriate comparison
for concerts is the price of other live entertainment events. Figure 3 compares concert
prices to the CPI-U sub-index for movies, sporting events and theater.9
To make the data
as comparable to the CPI as possible, I computed a Laspeyres price index for concerts
using the venue as the unit of observation. (Unlike the CPI, however, I updated the
weights on an annual basis.) Price growth for these entertainment events exceeded
overall price inflation throughout the period. Concert price growth tracked price growth
for the other entertainment events remarkably well from 1981 to 1996, but beginning in
1997 the two series diverged. From 1997 to 2003, the concert Lasypeyres index rose 64
percent, whereas the CPI for other entertainment events increased 32 percent. Thus, the
gap that needs to be explained is smaller, but still substantial.
Of course, a Princeton economist cannot address this topic with out
acknowledging the insight of Baumol and Bowen (1966). In some sense, musical
concerts are a slow productivity growth sector: it probably takes the Dixie Chix at least as
much time, effort and labor input to perform Landslide today as it took Fleetwood Mac to
perform it in the 1970s. As Baumol and Bowen point out, prices should rise faster than
overall inflation in low-productivity growth sectors because of cost increases. Baumol
and Bowen’s disease may well account for the mildly faster price growth in live
9
To be precise, the BLS produces a CPI for movies, sporting events, theater and concerts. A separate subindex
covering just movies, sporting events and theater is not available from BLS, so I adjusted the index
as follows. In November and December 2001, concerts accounted for 8.4 percent of price quotes for this
11
entertainment events than overall price inflation in the pre-1996 period. Yet it is unlikely
that there was a discrete jump in costs in the concert industry compared to other
industries – let alone other entertainment industries -- after 1996. Indeed, reductions in
the costs of audiovisual electronics equipment probably reduced the cost of concerts.
Nevertheless, some concert promoters do point to cost increases as a rationale for the
acceleration in prices. (They also have a tendency to say that they use more Mack trucks
than anyone else.) Unfortunately, I have not been able to track down concrete cost
information, and it is possible that insurance costs, labor costs, pyrotechnics and other
innovations have increased costs considerably, but I am skeptical that cost growth can
account for much of the acceleration in the price of concert tickets after 1996.
Shows, Sales and Revenues
Figures 4a, 4b and 4c summarize trends in the number of shows performed,
tickets sold, and revenue collected from 1981 to 2003. The figures restrict the sample to
artists in the Rolling Stone Encyclopedia because coverage should be more consistent for
these artists. If the entire universe of concerts is used, the trends are likely to be distorted
by the rising coverage of the Pollstar database.10
Several trends are noteworthy. First, the number of shows performed rose in the
1980s, plateaued in the first half of the 1990s, and has declined by 16 percent from 1996
to 2003.
sub-index (email correspondence from Patrick Jackman, Feb. 7, 2002). Consequently, I netted out the
concert component using my Laspeyres estimate of the concert CPI.
10
As mentioned, I suspect Pollstar increased the coverage rate of small shows performed by lesser known
performers over time. The trend in capacity utilization for the full universe is the same as that shown in
Figure 5, but the number of shows and tickets sold have trended upwards.
12
Second, the number of tickets sold to concerts performed by these bands
fluctuated around 30 million per year from the late 1980s until 2000, and has dropped
since 2000. In 2003, 22 million tickets were sold to concerts performed by these bands.
Third, despite flat or falling tickets sales, total revenues (in 2003 dollars) trended
upwards until 2000 because of price increases. Other things equal, these trends suggest
the elasticity of demand was less than 1. Since 2000, however, there has been a 10
percent drop in ticket revenue for these artists.
Figure 5 shows the capacity utilization rate for concerts by top artists – that is, the
fraction of available seats that are sold. (The number of available seats varies from
concert to concert within the same venue, and is recorded in the Pollstar Boxoffice form.)
The fraction of tickets sold fell from around 90 percent in the late 1980s to just over 75
percent in 2003. In results not reported here, I find that the drop in the capacity
utilization rate was much steeper for concerts held in larger venues. This finding
corresponds with the observation that large stadium tours (even Bruce Springsteen in the
Meadowlands in 2003; see Healy, 2003) are playing to smaller crowds.
One possible interpretation is that these artists are becoming less popular. But
this view is hard to reconcile with the sharp increase in ticket prices for Encyclopedia
bands. Instead, it seems that price growth is affecting demand for tickets.
Scalper vs. List Price
So far, we have treated the list price as the market price for attending a concert
ticket. If a concert is sold out and tickets are resold on a secondary market, however,
then the price to the consumer may be very different than the list price. The list price is
13
still relevant to the artist because he or she does not receive revenue from the secondary
market, but the surge in list prices may just reflect concert promoters and bands setting
prices at a level that eliminates or reduces the secondary market. (This begs the question
of why artists did not set a higher price to squeeze out the secondary market all along.)
Although I have no doubt that the secondary market is important in this industry,
there are three reasons to suspect that a disconnect between the list price and price to
consumers is not responsible for the major trends documented so far.
First, the total number of tickets sold has declined. If concerts are no more
expensive to consumers than before, then one would not expect to see attendance fall.
Second, the decline in the capacity utilization rate also suggests that customers
are finding concerts more costly. Moreover, even in the early 1990s, most concerts did
not sell out, so it would have been possible to avoid the higher priced secondary market.
And prices have surged in the late 1990s even I limit the sample to concerts that sold
fewer than 90 percent of their tickets, events where scalping would have been
unnecessary.
Third, and perhaps most important, from what I can tell scalping is not as
common a phenomenon as many industry observers believe. One fragment of evidence
comes from a survey of 858 fans I conducted with 12 students at Bruce Springsteen and
the E Street Band’s concert at the First Union Center in Philadelphia on October 6, 2002,
part of the Boss’s “The Rising” tour. The concert was a throwback: it was sold out and
every ticket in the house was listed for $75, well below the market rate. If any concert
would have a high scalping rate, this would be it. Yet only 20-25 percent of the tickets
14
were bought through a scalper or ticket broker or over the Web. The average ticket that
was resold went for around $280, yet most fans paid the list price.
Elsewhere, I have argued that “the endowment effect” is one reason why only a
minority of tickets is scalped (see Krueger, 2001). But regardless of the explanation, the
list price would seem relevant to the vast majority of concert goers.
Distribution of Revenues
As we saw, concert revenues increased in the 1980s and 1990s. Figure 6 displays
the share of revenue going to the top 1% and top 5% of all performers, ranked by their
total annual concert revenue. That is, for each band I computed the total dollar value of
ticket sales each year relative to the U.S. total.
Despite some blips, the figure shows that concert revenues became markedly
more skewed in the 1980s and 1990s. In 1981, the top 1% of artists took in 26% of
concert revenue; in 2003 that figure more than doubled to 56%. By contrast, the top 1%
of income tax filers in the U.S. garnered “just”14.6% of adjusted gross income in 1998
(see Piketty and Saez, 2003). The top 5% of revenue generators took in 62% of concert
revenue in 1982 and 84% in 2003. Surely, this is a superstar market if there ever was
one.
Table 1 reports the revenue, number of shows performed, revenue per show, and
average price for the top artists just before the run-up in prices (1994-95) and just after
(2000-01). The artists were selected by virtue of being one of the top revenue generators
in 1996-99, with revenues in the surrounding periods as well.
15
The number of shows performed by these superstar artists declined by 18% while
revenue per show increased by 60%. The increase in revenue was driven by both an
increase in price and increase in tickets per show.
The table also illustrates the breadth of the Pollstar data, as Luciano Pavarotti
would not generally be considered a popular singer. He and the other tenors are excluded
when the sample is restricted to artists in the Rolling Stone Encyclopedia.
Phenomenon to Explain
To recap, the data indicate that concert prices grew modestly faster than overall
inflation until 1997. Beginning in 1997, concert prices took off and ticket sales and the
number of concerts by stars declined. The evidence suggests that the price trends have
affected the cost of concert-going, not just the size of the secondary market.
Additionally, the share of revenue going to the top performers rose over the last two
decades.
These trends are inconsistent with a demand-side shift in the face of a stable
supply curve. The increasing skewness in the distribution of revenues, however, is
consistent with a shift in demand toward superstar performers.
For the economics of superstars to account for the quantity and price trends, it
must be that: 1) superstar effects increased sharply after 1996; and 2) superstar
performers have a backward bending supply curve that caused a decrease in concerts
despite the increase in revenues per show. We test the first prerequisite in the next
section and find little support for it. Figure 6 also suggests that the superstar model will
16
have difficulty explaining the acceleration in prices, as the tendency toward greater
concentration in revenues for top performers was no greater after1996.
Alternatively, and more likely, it seems that a discrete change in some supply-side
factor caused concert prices to increase and a reduction in the quantity of tickets sold in
the face of a steady expansion of superstar effects. In short, the trends are consistent with
the market becoming more monopolized. Section V explores two hypotheses to explain
why monopoly pricing may have increased in the late 1990s: concentration and
technological change.
IV. The Market for Superstars
The economics of superstars was proposed by Sherwin Rosen (1981), building on
the intuition of Marshall (1947), to explain why “relatively small numbers of people earn
enormous amounts of money and seem to dominate the fields in which they engage.”
Rosen’s formulation of superstar markets specifies performers as imperfect substitutes
and assumes that technology enables the best performers to reach a wide audience with
little decay in quality. Under these circumstances, small differences in talent at the top of
the distribution will translate into large differences in revenue.
Rosen concludes his article by commenting on Alfred Marshall’s explanation for
why Elizabeth Billington, a gifted opera singer at the start of the 19th
Century, was paid
less than a superstar salary. Marshall reasoned: “But so long as the number of persons
who can be reached by a human voice is strictly limited, it is not very likely that any
singer will make an advance on the £10,000 said to have been earned in a season by Mrs.
Billings at the beginning of the last century ....” Rosen shrewdly observed, “Even
17
adjusted for 1981 prices, Mrs. Billington must be a pale shadow beside Pavarotti.
Imagine her income had radio and phonograph records existed in 1801! What changes in
the future will be wrought by cable, video cassettes, and home computers?”
And what about by the Discman, internet, broadband, Napster, CD’s, DVD’s,
MTV, flat screen TVs, iPod’s, and MP3 players? One explanation for the increase in
concert prices and revenue concentration, anticipated by Rosen, is that technological
change led to increased superstar effects. Because of technological improvements and
rapid price declines in consumer electronics, for example, superstar performers are
known to a larger audience. In addition, anyone who has gone to a concert in the last
couple of decades can attest to improvements in amplification, so singers are hardly
limited by the reach of the unaided human voice.
Evidence
An objective measure of star quality for popular musicians is hard to define and
even harder to quantify. In one attempt, Hamlen (1991) measures voice quality by a
physical concept: the high frequency harmonic content that singers use when they croon
the word “love” in one of their songs. Clearly, this misses many dimensions of star
quality. Nonetheless, he finds that harmonic content is related to the value of record sales
for a sample of 107 singers, with an elasticity of 0.14. Hamlen interprets the low
elasticity as a rejection of the Marshall-Rosen model, although it is unclear whether the
scaling of units of quality is appropriate (a different scaling could produce an elasticity
18
above 1) and consideration of other dimensions of star quality could possibly rescue the
theory.11
Here I take a different tact. Star quality is measured by the number of millimeters
of print columns (including photos) devoted to each artist in The Rolling Stone
Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll. Although millimeters of print is a subjective measure of
star quality, it has the virtue of reflecting the importance that the editors of the
Encyclopedia implicitly attached to each artist. If nothing else, it is correlated with the
band’s prominence. To be clear, I should emphasize that star quality is measured at a
single point in time and I am looking for a change in the return to that measure of quality,
due to technological changes like the ones Sherwin Rosen conjectured about. The
question I ask is whether a discrete increase in the return to star quality in the late 1990s
can account for the growth in concert prices and revenues.
For the bands included in the Encyclopedia in the Pollstar sample, the mean and
standard deviation of millimeters of print are 268 and 199, respectively. The leastwritten-
about artist was Classics IV (52 mm) and the highest was The Rolling Stones
(1579 mm). The 25th
percentile group (The Weather Girls) had 201 mm. of ink, and the
75th
percentile (Beck or Lyle Lovett) had 378.
The Pollstar data were aggregated to the artist/year level. Specifically, for each
artist (i) in each year (t), I computed the (ticket-weighted) average price, total revenue,
and revenue per show. These are the dependent variables in my analysis (in logarithms).
I work with two samples: all artists and the subset listed in The Rolling Stone
Encyclopedia. Artists that were not listed in the Encyclopedia are assigned 0 millimeters
11
In case you are interested, the top four singers in his sample in terms of harmonic frequency are: Barbara
Streisand, Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, and George B. Shea, in that order. Whitney Houston ranked 18th
.
19
of print, which is technically correct (because that is how much ink they were given) but
perhaps arbitrary. For the sample of Encyclopedia bands, I present results with and
without covariates; only a limited set of covariates are available for the full set of bands.
The regression model is as follows:
(1) ln Yit = " + $pSi + x'it( + *t + ,it,
where ln Yit is the log average price (or log revenue or log revenue per show), Si is the
measure of Star Quality, x'it is a vector of covariates (number of supporting acts, years of
experience of the band, and dummies for genre, gender and foreign status), *t is a set of
22 unrestricted year fixed effects, and ,it is an error term. We compute standard errors
that are robust to correlation in artist effects across years.
Notice that the coefficient on star quality, $, has a p subscript, indicating time
period (1981-86, 1987-91, 1992-96, or 1997-2003). This allows the effect of star quality
to vary across time periods. In the regressions, this is accomplished by interacting the
amount of print with dummies indicating the four periods. The test of the rising-returnto-superstardom
hypothesis amounts to a test of whether there is a discrete jump in $p
after 1996.
Results are presented in Table 2 for the full sample and in Table 3 for the subset
of Encyclopedia bands. For presentation purposes, I have scaled the millimeters by
dividing by 1,000, so this variable should properly be interpreted as measured in meters.
The model for prices in the first column weights the data by the number of tickets sold by
each artist in each year, and the model for revenue per show is weighted by the number of
shows. The third model for annual revenue is unweighted. The weights (or in the last
case, lack of weights) were selected so the weighted mean of the dependent variable
20
would correspond to the national mean, since it is the national trends we are trying to
explain. Unweighted estimates are qualitatively similar, however.
First consider the results for the full sample. All three models indicate large and
increasing superstar effects. For example, a 200 millimeter increase in print in the
Encyclopedia is associated with 5% higher prices in the early 1980s, 11% higher prices in
the early 1990s, and 15% higher prices in 1997-2003. The effects on annual revenue and
revenue per performance is much larger. Although the return to star quality increased
throughout this period, the increase was actually slower after 1996 than before.12
For
superstar effects to explain the acceleration in prices after 1996, it would be necessary for
the effects to be growing at an increasing rate over time, but it is not.
Next consider the subsample of artists represented in the Encyclopedia. A similar
pattern emerges for prices: the effect of star power increased throughout the period, but
the largest jump occurred in 1992-1996, before prices took off. And the results for
annual revenue and revenue per show are even more contrary to the accelerating
superstar story. The effect of print in the Encyclopedia on these outcomes actually fell in
the 1997-2001 period compared to the 1992-96 period. Because revenue per
performance should be the driving force in the superstar model, these results strongly
suggest that accelerating returns to superstardom are not the explanation for the rapid
price growth after 1996, although I acknowledge that my measure of star quality is
imperfect.
Before considering other explanations for the price trends, it is worth commenting
12
If I include a linear time trend interacted with millimeters of print and an interaction between a post-1996
trend and print, instead of the period interactions with print, the same puzzle remains: the increase in the
return to star quality is slower after 1996 then before.
21
on the other coefficients in Table 3. First, female performers charge a higher price and
make more money per year or per show than male performers or than groups with both
male and female lead performers. Interestingly, Hamlen (1991) also found that women
singers earn higher revenue from record sales than male singers, other things being equal.
One possibility, however, is that the Table 3 results reflect the selection requirements for
inclusion in the Encyclopedia, rather than a true gender difference. To test this
possibility, I collected data on gender for a randomly selected 217 artists who were not
part of the Encyclopedia. Only 7.5% of these performers were women, compared with
14% in the Encyclopedia, and 14% were mixed gender compared with 7% in the
Encyclopedia, providing mild evidence that the Encyclopedia did not under represent
female artists. In any event, price regressions for this sample indicated that female
groups charged a statistically significant 31 percent higher price than mixed-gender
groups, but the male-female difference was insignificant and of inconsistent sign
depending on covariates.
Second, the regressions reveal very little return to experience, defined as the
length of time since the band started performing. I do find, however, that experience is
positively related to the gap between the high and low price charged at a concert.
Apparently, older bands are more likely to price discriminate, perhaps because they are
less concerned about building good will for the future or because they have a more
diverse group of fans.
Third, the number of supporting acts that appear with the headliner is only weakly
related to the price, but strongly related to revenue. Fourth, revenues are highest for Pop
artists, while prices are highest for Jazz and Pop artists.
22
Finally, foreign bands charge a slightly higher price and make more revenue in
the U.S. than home-grown bands.
V. Explanations: Cartelization and Bowie Theory
A. Cartelization
A popular explanation for the acceleration in concert prices is that the concert
industry has become monopolized by Clear Channel Communications, the giant
multimedia conglomerate. There is an air of plausibility to this story. After the
Telecommunications Act of 1996 relaxed constraints on radio station ownership, Clear
Channel acquired nearly 1,200 stations. It also owns amphitheaters, billboards and TV
stations. Clear Channel entered the concert promotion business in a major way by
acquiring SFX Entertainment in 2000, and, as shown in Figure 7, the share of concert
revenue that it promotes rose dramatically from 1999 to 2001 and then fell sharply in
2002 and 2003. Despite the recent dip, concentration in the industry has risen at the
national level (see the four-firm concentration ratio in Figure 7).
Many critics have accused Clear Channel of using its vertical and horizontal
concentration to monopolize the concert industry. Congressman Howard L. Berman, for
example, has urged the Justice Department to investigate whether "Clear Channel has
'punished' recording artists, including Britney Spears, for their refusal to use its concert
promotion service, Clear Channel Entertainment, by 'burying' radio ads for their concerts
and by refusing to play their songs on its radio stations." The on-line magazine Slate
declared, “Clear Channel is an illegal monopoly”(see Boehlert, 2001).
23
Although anecdotal evidence abounds -- and the rising prices and declining ticket
sales documented in Section III are certainly consistent with the exercise of greater
monopoly power after the mid 1990s – I have found it surprisingly difficult to find clear
evidence linking Clear Channel to the exorbitant growth in concert prices.
For starters, I assembled data from Arbitron on FM radio audiences by station
ownership for 98 major cities in 2002. Clear Channel’s “radio share” was calculated by
summing the percentage of their listeners over the stations they owned in each market
reached by the stations. Clear Channel’s radio listening share, which ranged from 0 to 42
percent across these markets and averaged 20%, was then related to the share of ticket
revenue for concerts promoted by Clear Channel in those markets in 2000 and 2001. The
unweighted correlation between Clear Channel’s concert share and radio share across the
98 markets was essentially zero (r=.01). When the data were weighted by the size of the
population in each market, the correlation was positive (r=.08) but statistically
insignificant. The correlation was on the margin of statistical significance (t-ratio=1.72)
and positive (r =.17) when the data were weighted by the number of concerts held in each
market, but if we restrict the sample to concerts in venues with a capacity of at least
2,000 seats – because smaller concerts are unlikely to be promoted on the radio – we find
a weak and insignificant (weighted) correlation between Clear Channel’s radio share and
concert promotion share.
I also tried aggregating the data to the state level. Again, the correlations were
weak and insignificant. Even when I weighted the state data by the number of concerts
performed in the state, the correlation was insignificant and low (r=.11).
24
Next I examined the relationship between concentration and the growth of ticket
prices. At either the city or state level, Clear Channel’s share of concert promotion
dollars was insignificantly or negatively related to the growth in prices. Likewise, I
found no correlation between the change in the concentration of concert promoters in an
area from 1994 to 2001 and the corresponding growth of prices or ticket sales.
It is possible that Clear Channel uses its muscle to sign up concerts for national or
international tours, obscuring the city- and state-level correlations, but one would have
expected the regional data to leave some trace of Clear Channel's influence if it was the
main force behind accelerating prices.
Three further pieces of evidence cast doubt on the importance of the increased
concentration of concert promotion in the U.S. First, ticket prices have also risen sharply
in Canada and Europe since the mid-1990's, suggesting that deregulation of radio in the
United States is not driving the trend, although it is possible that prices are arbitraged
across markets and the U.S. is a big market.
Second, concert promotion has not yielded supernormal profits for Clear Channel,
and has often resulted in losses (see Pollstar, 2002). The company blames artists for
demanding higher fees, which it says cause higher ticket prices. Although paying higher
fees may reflect predatory behavior intended to drive out competitors, it is nonetheless
surprising that Clear Channel has not managed to profit from promoting concerts in areas
where it dominates the radio market. Moreover, the fact that Clear Channel cut back its
concert promotions in 2002 and 2003 suggests it was not a very profitable enterprise.
Third, concert promotion has always been a highly concentrated business at the
city level, which might be most relevant for exercising monopoly power because most
25
audience members are unlikely to travel very far to attend a concert. The regional
concentration is borne out in Figure 8, which shows the average four-firm concentration
ratio in the largest 24 cities. The four-firm concentration ratio within cities has hovered
around 90% for two decades. The average Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI) for
promoters actually fell from a lofty 4,200 in 1986 to a still high but less lofty value of
2,800 in 2001. (An industry with an HHI above 1,800 is considered highly concentrated
according to the Justice Department Merger Guidelines.) Thus, the industry has gone
from having regional monopolies to having a large national firm, but within cities
competition could possibly have increased.
Although I was initially inclined to believe that Clear Channel’s horizontal and
vertical concentration was a major reason for the hike in concert prices, after reviewing
more evidence I have become skeptical of that position.
B. Bowie Theory
My final hypothesis, and the one I consider most promising at the moment, is that
concert prices have soared because recording artists have seen a large decline in their
income from record sales, a complementary product to concerts. Many observers have
argued that record sales are down because many potential customers frequently download
music free from the Web or copy CD’s, either legally or illegally. Millions of people
have downloaded music from Napster, Morpheus and KaZaA -- and probably bought
fewer records as a result. Album sales slumped from 1999 to 2002, and were flat for 5
years before then, putting downward pressure on artists' royalties.13
13
See Weinraub (2002).
26
Each band has some monopoly power because of its unique sound and style. So
my hypothesis is that, in the past, when greater concert attendance translated into greater
artists’ record sales, artists had an incentive to price their tickets below the profitmaximizing
price for concerts alone. New technology that allows many potential
customers to obtain recorded music without purchasing a record has severed the link
between the two products. As a result, concerts are being priced more like single-market
monopoly products.14
Moreover, only the very best artists received royalties anyway, so
this phenomenon can explain why dispersion has increased.
Formally, the problem is one of a firm with two complementary outputs, concert
seats and record albums, denoted good 1 and good 2, and monopoly power in both
markets (see Tirole, 1988 or Rosen and Rosenfield, 1997). Because of the
complementarities, we represent the band’s demand curve for each product, D1(p1,p2) and
D2(p1,p2), as depending on both prices. Costs are independent of each other and depend
only on the quantity of each specific good produced, C1(D1) and C2(D2). The firm
maximizes profit by selecting both prices, p1 and p2, as follows:
Max p1D1(p1,p2) + p2D2(p1,p2) – C1(D1) – C2(D2)
{p1, p2}
The proportionate markup of concert tickets over marginal cost is:
= −1p
1p
'
1C−
1ε
1
1
1ε2 2)D
1ε
'
2C−
1p 1D 1
( 2p
where the ,ij
’s represent the value of the own- or cross-price elasticities of demand.
14
Note, however, that there are still some other complementary products, such as shirts and souvenirs. In
addition, many artists care about besmirching their reputations as greedy. Thus, prices are unlikely to rise
to their full single-market monopoly level.
27
My argument is that the magnitude of the second term of the markup equation has
declined, because an increase in concert attendance -- or popularity more generally -- has
a much weaker effect on record sales beginning in the late 1990s. Therefore, artists and
their managers do not need to feel as constrained when they set concert prices.
This model was anticipated by the rock & roll singer David Bowie, who predicted
that, "Music itself is going to become like running water or electricity" and he advised
performers, "You'd better be prepared for doing a lot of touring because that's really the
only unique situation that's going to be left." (Quoted from Pareles, 2002.) Hence, I call
this hypothesis Bowie Theory.
I should acknowledge that the timing for Bowie Theory is not perfect, but it is not
terrible either. Napster was launched in May 1999 and imitators and MP3 players
quickly followed. CD’s could be copied in the late 1990s, however. Although concert
price growth began to diverge from price growth for other entertainment events in 1997,
the biggest jump was in 1999.
There is also some fragmentary empirical support for the hypothesis. Relative to
album sales, Jazz fans are much less likely to download music from the Web than are
fans of rock and pop (see Oberholzer and Strumpf, 2004). From 1996 to 2003, concert
prices increased by only 20 percent for jazz, but by 99 percent for rock and pop. The
declining complementarities argument can also account for the price growth in Canada
and Europe. On the other hand, I have to admit that the direct evidence for filing sharing
crowding out record sales is more mixed than I anticipated (see Liebowitz, 2003 and
Oberholzer and Strumpf, 2004).
28
VI. Conclusion
Concert revenues for top rock & roll performers, along with ticket prices, took off
in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The economics of superstars can help explain the
longer-term trends in the industry, but not the recent surge in prices and revenues. My
leading hypothesis for these developments is Bowie theory: a technology-induced erosion
of the complementarity between record sales and concert tickets. Even if Bowie theory is
premature, it is likely that downloading of music will put upward pressure on concert
prices and revenue in the near future.
In addition, interests of performers apart from income maximization play a role in
the economics of the rock & roll industry. By my calculation, Bruce Springsteen gave
away $3 million of producer surplus to his fans in Philadelphia by setting his (uniform)
ticket price below the market price. This figure is double the ticket revenue the concert
actually took in! A similar point was made by Tom Petty:
My top price is about sixty-five dollars, and I turn a very healthy profit on
that; I make millions on the road. I see no reason to bring the price up,
even though I have heard many an anxious promoter say, ‘We could
charge 150 bucks for this.’ I would like to do this again and maybe come
through and not leave a bad taste in people’s mouths. … It’s so wrong to
say, ‘OK, we’ve got them on the ticket and we’ve got them on the beer
and we’ve got on everything else, let’s get them on the damn parking.’
You got to care about the person you’re dealing with. (Quoted from Wild,
2002. Italics added.)
Some artists care about their customers’ well being as well as their own income.
It is hard to rule out the possibility that concert tickets were under priced in the 1980s and
early 1990s, perhaps because of “fairness” considerations. Nevertheless, the market still
responds to economic forces. It is telling that both Bruce Springsteen and Tom Petty
have more than doubled their ticket prices since the early 1990s. Super Bowl ticket
29
prices, which are undoubtedly grossly under priced, have increased much faster than
concert prices the last 25 years. For experience goods, prices may be kept below their
market-clearing level because the price is part of the experience, especially if performers
are trying to build a long-term audience. Eventually, however, it seems that the prices of
experience goods approach their market clearing level, perhaps because fans come to
divorce the price from the experience.
This foray into the concert industry labor market highlighted the importance of
Industrial Organization because of industry concentration, complementary products and
rent sharing. I would argue that in labor markets more generally, it is in the interest of
Labor Economists to explore the links between Industrial Organization and Labor
Economics more thoroughly. Rent sharing probably accounts for a large share of the
industry wage differentials that arise for similar workers (Dickens and Katz, 1987;
Krueger and Summers, 1987); market concentration affects the hiring of female
employees within industry (Ashenfelter and Hannan, 1986); deregulation has affected
wages and employment (Peoples, 1998); technological change appears to have been a
major reason for the rise in wage dispersion and skill differentials in the 1980s and 1990s
(Autor, Katz and Krueger, 1998); and norms can affect the distribution of income
(Piketty and Saez, 2003). Our understanding of labor markets will be incomplete unless
we better appreciate the interactions among product markets, technology and labor
markets, and recognize how fairness considerations are moderated by market forces – in
the rock & roll industry and elsewhere.
30
References
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Market Competition: The Case of the Banking Industry. Quarterly Journal of
Economics (February). 149–73.
Autor, David, Lawrence Katz and Alan Krueger. 1998. "Computing Inequality: Have
Computers Changed the Labor Market?" Quarterly Journal of Economics 113, no.
4 (November):1169-1213.
Baumol, William J. and William G. Bowen. 1966. Performing Arts: The Economic
Dilemma, New York: The Twentieth Century Fund.
Boehlert, Eric. 2001. Suit: Clear Channel is an illegal monopoly,” Slate.com (August
8), http://dir.salon.com/ent/clear_channel/2001/08/08/antitrust/index.html.
Caves, Richard E. 2000. Creative Industries: Contracts Between Art and Commerce.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Christensen, Thor. 2002. Concert Ticket Prices Soaring. Dallas Morning News, June 6.
Dickens, William and Lawrence Katz. 1987. Inter-Industry Wage Differences and
Industry Characteristics. In Kevin Lang and Jonathan Leonard, eds.,
Unemployment and the Structure of Labor Markets, Oxford: Basil-Blackwell.
Eliot, Marc. 1993. Rockonomics: The Money Behind the Music. New York: Carol
Publishing Group, 2nd
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Hamlen, William A. 1991. Superstardom in Popular Music: Empirical Evidence.
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Healy, Patrick. 2003. Springsteen Ticket Scalpers, Glory Days Have Passed You By.
The New York Times, (July 28), p. B1.
Krueger, Alan B. Supply and Demand: An Economist Goes to the Super Bowl. 2001.
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the Structure of Labor Markets, Oxford: Basil-Blackwell.
Liebowitz, Stan. 2003. Will MP3 downloads Annihilate the Record Industry? The
Evidence so Far. In Advances in the Study of Entrepreneurship, Innovation and
Economic Growth, edited by Gary Libecap, JAI Press.
Marshall, Alfred. 1947. Principles of Economics, 8th
Edition, New York: MacMillan.
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Oberholzer, Felix, and Koleman Strumpf. 2004. The Effect of File Sharing on Record
Sales: An Empirical Analysis. Mimeo., University of North Carolina, Chapel
Hill.
Osbourne, Sharon. 2002. Interview: Women in Rock. Rolling Stone Magazine,
October 31, Issue 908, pp. 54-56.
Pareles, Jon. 2002. David Bowie, 21st
-Century Entrepreneur. The New York Times
(June 9): 30.
Peoples, James. 1998. Deregulation and the Labor Market. Journal of Economic
Perspectives, (Summer): 111-130.
Piketty, Thomas and Saez, Emanuel. 2003. Income Inequality in the United States, 1913-
1998. Quarterly Journal of Economics.
Pollstar Daily News Service. 2002. Clear Channel Posts $1.14 Billion Loss in 2001.
March 1.
Rosen, Sherwin. 1981. The Economics of Superstars. The American Economic Review,
71, No. 5. (December): 845-858.
Rosen, Sherwin, and Andrew M. Rosenfield. 1997. Ticket Pricing. The Journal of Law
and Economics, 40, (October): 351-376.
Tirole, Jean. 1998. The Theory of Industrial Organization. Cambridge, Mass: MIT
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Weinraub, Bernard. 2002. For the Industry, Less to Celebrate at the Grammys. The New
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Wild, David. 2002. “Tom Petty is Pissed,” Rolling Stone Magazine (October 23).
32
Figure 1: Average Price per Ticket, High and Low Price Tickets, and Overall Inflation Rate,
1981-2003
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
1981
1982
1983
1984
1985
1986
1987
1988
1989
1990
1991
1992
1993
1994
1995
1996
1997
1998
1999
2000
2001
2002
2003
Price
Low
Average
High
CPI
Figure 2: Average Concert Ticket Price, Selected Artists
0
20
40
60
80
100
120
140
160
180
1981
1982
1983
1984
1985
1986
1987
1988
1989
1990
1991
1992
1993
1994
1995
1996
1997
1998
1999
2000
2001
2002
2003
Year
TicketPrice
Madonna
U2
Rolling Stones
Garth Brooks
Cher
Aerosmith
Billy Joel
Billy Joel/Elton
John
Elton John
Bruce Springsteen
Figure 3: Concert Prices Tracked Movie, Theater and Sports Tickets Well Until 1997
Venue Laspeyres Price Index versus CPI-U for Movies, Theater and Sports Events
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
40
45
50
1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003
AveragePrice
Concerts
Movies, Theater
& Sports
Figure 4a: Number of Shows Each Year
Rolling Stone Encyclopedia Artists
0
1000
2000
3000
4000
5000
6000
7000
8000
1982
1983
1984
1985
1986
1987
1988
1989
1990
1991
1992
1993
1994
1995
1996
1997
1998
1999
2000
2001
2002
2003
NumberofShows
Figure 4b: Number of Tickets Sold Each Year
Rolling Stone Encyclopedia Artists
10
15
20
25
30
35
40
1982
1983
1984
1985
1986
1987
1988
1989
1990
1991
1992
1993
1994
1995
1996
1997
1998
1999
2000
2001
2002
2003
NumberofTicketsSold(Millions)
Figure 4c: Total Ticket Revenue in 2003 Dollars
Rolling Stone Encyclopedia Bands
$0
$200
$400
$600
$800
$1,000
$1,200
$1,400
1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003
TicketSales(Millions)
Figure 5: Proportion of Seats That Are Filled for Concerts held by
Artists Listed in Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll
0.5
0.55
0.6
0.65
0.7
0.75
0.8
0.85
0.9
0.95
1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003
ProportionofSeatsFilled
0%
20%
40%
60%
80%
100%
1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003
Year
Figure 6: Share of Total Ticket Revenue Accruing to Top Performers, 1982-2003
Top 1 Percent
Top 2-5 Percent
Everybody Else
1981 1986 1991 1996 2001 2003
20
40
60
80
Fig. 7: Percent of Total Revenue Handled by Biggest 4 Promoters,
Nationwide and by Clear Channel Communications
PercentofTicketRevenue
Source: Calculated by Alan Krueger based on Pollstar data. Only concerts performed in the
U.S. are included in the analysis. Sample consists of artists listed in The Rolling Stone Encyclopedia.
CC refers to Clear Channel Communications share.
41%
CC
90.5%
Figure 8: Average Within-Market Percent of Revenue Handled by
the Biggest Four Promoters in Each CityPercentofTicketRevenue
1981 1986 1991 1996 2001
20
40
60
80
Source: Calculated by Alan Krueger based on Pollstar data. Sample consists of artists listed
in The Rolling Stone Encyclopedia. Figure shows average of percent in each of the top 24 cities.
Table 1: Concert Revenue and Prices in 1994-95 and 2000-01 for Artists with Highest Revenue per Show in 1996-1999
1994-5 2000-1 Percent Change
Artist Total Revenue Number Rev. per show Average Total Revenue Number Rev. per show Average Total Revenue Number Rev. per show Average
(in thousands) of Shows (in thousands) Price (in thousands) of shows (in thousands) Price (in thousands) of shows (in thousands) Price
The Eagles $151,000 102 $1,480 $67.50 $4,837 1 $4,837 $89.22 -96.8% -99.0% 226.8% 32.2%
Barbra Streisand 54,200 20 2,710 201.65 27,700 4 6,925 483.61 -48.9% -80.0% 155.5% 139.8%
Reba McEntire 50,200 147 341 29.49 11,800 43 274 42.76 -76.5% -70.7% -19.6% 45.0%
Jimmy Buffett 35,700 64 558 31.39 49,600 62 800 39.84 38.9% -3.1% 43.4% 26.9%
George Strait 28,600 76 376 23.73 22,500 11 2,045 48.60 -21.3% -85.5% 443.5% 104.8%
Aerosmith 24,200 54 448 29.64 45,900 59 778 47.34 89.7% 9.3% 73.6% 59.7%
Elton John 24,200 37 654 40.66 21,800 38 574 56.70 -9.9% 2.7% -12.3% 39.4%
Phish 23,100 141 164 23.27 21,300 40 533 30.50 -7.8% -71.6% 225.0% 31.0%
Eric Clapton 21,500 40 538 42.65 32,900 40 823 62.46 53.0% 0.0% 53.0% 46.4%
Metallica 20,800 40 520 27.74 37,500 18 2,083 60.45 80.3% -55.0% 300.6% 117.9%
Rod Stewart 18,500 35 529 39.46 23,900 58 412 46.12 29.2% 65.7% -22.0% 16.9%
Janet Jackson 14,200 33 430 36.54 38,400 51 753 64.37 170.4% 54.5% 75.0% 76.1%
Dave Matthews Band 10,700 131 82 21.55 129,000 110 1,173 43.72 1105.6% -16.0% 1335.8% 102.8%
Pearl Jam 9,264 33 281 23.32 8,454 18 470 28.91 -8.7% -45.5% 67.3% 24.0%
Beastie Boys 6,196 28 221 22.99 338 2 169 50.00 -94.5% -92.9% -23.6% 117.5%
Luciano Pavarotti 5,410 4 1,352 88.19 10,300 9 1,144 105.78 90.4% 125.0% -15.4% 19.9%
Bruce Springsteen &
The E Street Band 1,652 16 103 35.45 47,000 48 979 65.20 2745.3% 200.0% 848.4% 83.9%
Ozzy Osbourne 1,516 12 126 28.86 49,100 67 733 43.37 3139.3% 458.3% 480.2% 50.3%
Paul Simon 368 1 368 82.14 5,989 25 240 34.35 1529.4% 2400.0% -34.8% -58.2%
Mariah Carey 325 1 325 27.51 6,687 8 836 59.70 1960.5% 700.0% 157.6% 117.0%
KISS 141 1 141 11.94 60,100 118 509 50.07 42436.8% 11700.0% 260.5% 319.3%
Average $23,894 48.4 $494 $40.41 $31,196 39.5 $789 $50.02 30.6% -18.3% 59.8% 23.8%
Source: Computations based on Pollstar database. All dollar figures converted to 2001 dollars based on CPI-U.
Table 2: Price, Revenue and Revenue per Show Regressions
for All Artists
----------------------------------------------------
Log Price Log Annual Log Revenue
Revenue per Show
Variable (1) (2) (3)
----------------------------------------------------
Intercept 2.261* 9.493* 9.277*
(0.053) (0.121) (0.143)
Star Quality 0.234* 3.513* 2.413*
* 1981-86 (0.058) (0.228) (0.175)
Star Quality 0.289* 4.555* 3.090*
* 1987-91 (0.043) (0.220) (0.189)
Star Quality 0.523* 5.222* 3.495*
* 1992-96 (0.065) (0.240) (0.240)
Star Quality 0.700* 5.508* 3.571*
* 1997-2003 (0.066) (0.234) (0.240)
Number of 0.0003 0.094* 0.024*
Support Acts (0.0003) (0.003) (0.001)
R-sq 0.518 0.366 0.359
Sample Size 35,835 35,835 35,835
----------------------------------------------------
Notes: Robust standard errors in parentheses. All
equations include year dummies. Column 1 is estimated
by WLS, where weights are tickets sold; Column 2 is
estimated by OLS; and column 3 is estimated by WLS where
weights are the number of shows performed in the year.
Star Quality is millimeters of space devoted to the artist
in the Rolling Stone Encyclopedia, divided by 1,000.
~ indicates p<0.05; * indicates p<0.01
Table 3: Price, Revenue and Revenue per Show Regressions for Artists Listed
in The Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Log Price Log Annual Log Revenue Log Price Log Annual Log Revenue
Revenue per Show Revenue per Show
Variable (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Intercept 2.258* 9.572* 9.222* 2.241* 9.834* 9.519*
(0.063) (0.181) (0.236) (0.070) (0.302) (0.279)
Star Qual 0.248* 3.314* 2.592* 0.237* 3.358* 2.468*
*1981-86 (0.068) (0.342) (0.327) (0.054) (0.361) (0.281)
Star Qual 0.264* 3.862* 2.790* 0.260* 3.889* 2.662*
*1987-91 (0.050) (0.358) (0.258) (0.041) (0.374) (0.272)
Star Qual 0.478* 4.047* 2.822* 0.455* 4.105* 2.646*
*1992-96 (0.077) (0.383) (0.325) (0.077) (0.393) (0.327)
Star Qual 0.632* 3.542* 2.346* 0.616* 3.637* 2.206*
*1997+ (0.097) (0.341) (0.307) (0.10) (0.350) (0.305)
No. of 0.0002 0.084* 0.022* 0.001~ 0.084* 0.022*
Sppt Acts (0.0003) (0.004) (0.002) (0.000) (0.005) (0.002)
Male 0.084 0.344 0.220
(0.048) (0.238) (0.185)
Female 0.213* 0.627~ 0.475~
(0.057) (0.259) (0.197)
Experience 0.003 -0.008 0.003
(0.002) (0.005) (0.005)
Foreign 0.065~ 0.240~ 0.194
(0.026) (0.112) (0.103)
Genre
Other -0.307* -0.985* -1.178*
(0.113) (0.255) (0.270)
Blues -0.236* -0.955* -1.593*
(0.054) (0.342) (0.437)
Country/Western -0.189* -0.267 -0.289
(0.047) (0.215) (0.184)
Folk -0.222~ -1.199* -1.298*
(0.091) (0.251) (0.210)
Jazz 0.044 -0.380 -0.504
(0.083) (0.298) (0.294)
Rock & Roll -0.169* -0.785* -0.587*
(0.030) (0.144) (0.141)
- continued -
Table 3 – Continued
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Log Price Log Annual Log Revenue Log Price Log Annual Log Revenue
Revenue per Show Revenue per Show
Variable (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
R&B -0.105 -0.550* -0.462~
(0.076) (0.197) (0.222)
Rap -0.180* -1.155* -0.761*
(0.041) (0.191) (0.182)
Reggae -0.320* -0.949* -1.278*
(0.060) (0.271) (0.264)
R-sq 0.668 0.382 0.338 0.715 0.416 0.406
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Notes: Robust standard errors in parentheses. All equations include year
dummies. Columns 1 and 4 are estimated by WLS, where weights are tickets sold;
Columns 2 and 5 are estimated by OLS; and columns 3 and 6 are estimated by WLS
where weights are the number of shows performed in the year. Baseline genre
dummy is pop music. Baseline gender is both men and women.
Star Qual is millimeters of space devoted to the artist
in the Rolling Stone Encyclopedia, divided by 1,000.
Sample size is 10,043 artist/year observations.
~ indicates p<0.05; * indicates p<0.01