Death-related publicity as informational advertising: evidence from the music industry
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Death-related publicity as informational advertising: evidence from the music industry Leif Brandes & Stephan Nüesch & Egon Franck
# Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014
Abstract The sales of books, DVDs, and music albums frequently increase substantially after the death of an artist. Yet, the mechanism behind this stylized fact remains unclear. In this paper, we examine whether after-death sales increases reflect primarily an affective reaction of existing customers or informative advertising for previously uninformed new customers. In our main study, we use weekly sales data for 446 music albums of 77 artists who died between 1992 and 2010. We show that album sales increase on average by 54.1 % after death and that the relative increase in sales is higher for the artist’s better albums. This suggests that death-related publicity serves primarily as informational advertising that attracts new customers who buy the artist’s best albums after death. Complementary evidence from a survey study with more than 2,000 participants confirms this interpretation and shows that information-based motives are relatively more important for after-death consumption than affect-based motives. Keywords Death-related effects . Advertising . Context effect . Publicity . Cultural markets
1 Introduction It is a stylized fact of cultural markets that product sales of an artist increase after death. Consider the recent deaths of Lou Reed (singer), Philip Seymour Hoffman (actor), and L. Brandes (*) Warwick Business School, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK e-mail: [email protected] S. Nüesch School of Business and Economics, University of Münster, Georgskommende 26, 48143 Münster, Germany e-mail: [email protected] E. Franck Department of Business Administration, University of Zurich, Plattenstrasse 14, 8032 Zurich, Switzerland e-mail: [email protected]
Mark Lett
Gabriel Garcia Marquez (writer). Figure 1 shows, for each artist, the weekly total sales for related products on Ebay.com in the 9 weeks before and after death. For all three artists, we can see an immediate and dramatic sales increase once the news about the death starts to spread. In the music industry, which serves as the context for the present study, the sales gains of a dead artist are often so high that the artist’s albums reenter the charts. For example, after Michael Jackson had died on June 25, 2009, it took less than 24 h for his work to account for every entry in the top 10 album charts at Amazon.com. The death of Whitney Houston even led to a new sales record. In the week following her death on February 21, 2012, she became the first woman to place three albums in the top 10 of the Billboard 200 charts at the same time. A key feature of cultural markets is that the products (e.g., books, music albums, movies) are reproducible. This marks a considerable difference from the market for fine art, where researchers have already analyzed “death effects” (e.g., Ekelund et al. 2000; Ursprung and Wiermann 2011). Their e
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