Abstract
This paper examines whether commercial success in the popular recorded-music industry, as measured by gold-record output, conforms to an empirical concentration. We find that Lotka's Law overestimates the number of artists with one gold record and underestimates the number of multiplegold-record performing artists. However, for all measures of “successful” records, theGeneralized Lotka's Law provides an excellent fit, which suggests that the number of performers producingn gold records in about 1/n c of those producing one gold record.
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Cox, R.A.K., Felton, J.M. & Chung, K.H. The concentration of commercial success in popular music: An analysis of the distribution of gold records. J Cult Econ 19, 333–340 (1995). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01073995
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01073995