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Television singing competitions create stars? Empirical evidence from the digital music chart in South Korea

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Abstract

After the success of American Idol, television singing competitions have become widespread and popular around the world. Although this format has had a substantial influence on the music market of many countries, few studies have quantified this influence. This study examines whether musicians from singing competitions (contestants) earned more money through digital music sales than did other musicians (non-contestants). We used a unique dataset that summed sales from the top 200 monthly digital music chart of South Korea between 2011 and 2014. We analyze the number of the song sold during this tenure, considering several variables such as gender and seasonality. Our findings indicate that songs by contestants yielded larger sales than did those of non-contestants. This positive impact is greater for the top two finalists in the competitions. The insights gained in this study will provide guidance to record companies who are considering recording contracts with contest winners.

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Notes

  1. According to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), while physical record sales have decreased from $13.7 billion in 2001 to $3.6 billion in 2010, digital record sales accounted for $3.2 billion in 2010 in the USA. As a consequence, the market size of the music industry has halved over the decade.

  2. For example, television viewers may participate in voting to determine the winner of the show, and the audience may share feelings about favorite contestants with friends in online social media. These activities may result in enhanced loyalty to the contestants and may be beneficial for their success in the professional music market.

  3. For instance, according to Nielson, Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” and Israel “Iz” Kamakawiwo’Ole’s version of “What a Wonderful World” debuted in the American Idol revived the original versions by bringing them to numbers one and eleven on the Hot Digital Song List, respectively (Marketing Charts 2008).

  4. For example, several songs on one album can be released by a particular musician and listed on the chart simultaneously. These songs are treated as different observations in the study. Also, two musicians may sing different arrangements of the same song; these are also treated as two different observations.

  5. The title of the television singing competition from the cable channel Mnet is “Superstar K”; this is the longest-running show (since 2009). The other two are “Star Audition: The Great Birth” on MBC and “Audition Survival: K-pop Star” on SBS; both were started in 2010.

  6. We firstly considered two different independent variables, the time elapsed (since participation) and the career year (since official debut), on the regression analysis. Here, the time elapsed variable literally captures the time elapsed since participation in the contest and the career year captures the time since official debut with a new song. This is plausible in the sense that the reality singing competition is another way for agencies to source talent that can be debuted faster as successful contestants require less training to get up to scratch, and into a readily accepting market due to public recognition of them. For these reasons, we define that the debut year for both contestants and non-contestant is the year when their first new song is released as a professional singer.

  7. Seasonality is captured by four different dummies: March 1–May 31, spring, June 1–August 31, summer, September 1–November 30, fall, and December 1–February 29, winter. The year of a certain song represents the year in which it first appeared on the chart.

  8. Apart from participating in the contest, there is another path to debut; one can become a trainee after passing the internal screening of a particular agency. As a trainee, she has to take singing, dancing and acting lessons up to 5 h or more a day on average. The life of a trainee is hard and tiring as another step to compete before official debut, in which many trainees are likely to give up their dreams of becoming a star. It is known that the average training period for a successful trainee is usually between 2 and 4 years although it can vary for each trainee. Based on this process for debut, the training period is considered as another competition to survive before official debut, rather than a career experience. In fact, it was hard for us to acquire each musician’s training period unless the musician or agency officially announces it to the public. Therefore, we do measure the “career year” with the time since official debut excluding the training period for the non-contestant.

  9. Note that we also tested if the group of winners in the singing competitions yields different results from those of the group of top two finalists. We find that estimated parameters are very similar to those in Table 4.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Business, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Seoul, South Korea

    Daegon Cho

  2. School of Journalism, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, USA

    Seok Ho Lee

  3. School of Computing, Informatics, and Decision Systems Engineering, Arizona State University, Tempe, USA

    Yeawon Yoo

  4. College of International Studies, Kyung Hee University, Yongin, South Korea

    Hyo-Youn Chu

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  1. Daegon Cho
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Cho, D., Lee, S.H., Yoo, Y. et al. Television singing competitions create stars? Empirical evidence from the digital music chart in South Korea. J Cult Econ 43, 1–20 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10824-018-9327-3

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