An Empirical Study of the Impact of New Album Releases on Sales of Old Albums by the Same Recording Artist

This paper examines the impact of the release of a new album on sales of old albums by the same recording artist. We find that a new album increases sales of the old albums, and the increase is substantial and permanent. The pattern of spillovers across pairs of albums suggests that the main source of the spillover is consumers who change their minds about the value of buying old albums, either because of new information or because of preference complementarities with the new album. Our findings have important implications for contractual relationships between distributor and artist, for investment, marketing, and pricing of albums, and for market structure.