Eric Hogue

Using a comprehensive data set of hand-collected observations of top touring performing artists, I examine the relationship between recorded music and concert financial outcomes. I find that music streaming derives substantive financial benefit to the top-100 touring artists. Using empirical estimates from a panel model with artist fixed-effects, an artist can derive an incremental $46K to $49K per show when achieving a 20% increase in music streaming. Additionally, using a 2SLS model with artist fixed-effects to account for potential endogenous promotional effects, I identify top performers (‘superstars’) who derive significant additional concert revenue because of their back-catalog of hit songs. These top performers earn an incremental $15K per show in response to every week they have a song from their catalog in the Billboard Top-20. These findings indicate that artists maintain the ability to use their musical and performance legacy to build lifelong earnings from their music and performance.

This paper examines the complementary effects of live concerts on incremental post-concert music streams in twenty-nine US cities. The work identifies that performers who have greater concert ticket demand, deeper hit-song catalogs, and/or are in the middle of their careers experience stronger trends in their post concert streams. While I found a positive complementary relationship between concert and streaming that lasts up to 10 weeks after the event, this work also highlights the negative effects when performers cancel shows. Using hand-collected data of concert ticket sales, music streaming, and song rankings from the top sixty global performing artists, I utilized a panel model with artist and market fixed-effects to identify post-concert decaying effects. This work will help top-performing artists gain insight into the little-understood influence of live performance on post-concert streaming of their recorded music.

I examined the impact of the Music Modernization Act (MMA) and a co-occurring regulation on the release activity by composers and musical performers. The analysis uses a negative binomial count model with artist fixed effects to identify incremental release activity. Demographic and music copyright covariates were included to identify heterogeneity. While not impacting release activity overall, I identified increased release activity among composers (increasing with composer credits) as well as younger and female performers. These findings are observed in two instances: (1) during the post-period after the MMA was enacted and (2) during the negotiation period while the MMA was written and debated. Additionally, while there has been a significant increase in the release of singles, this phenomenon appears to be driven by the growth of music streaming. This work identifies the extent to which this new law and federal regulation have encouraged recording artists to increase their release activity.

Firms launching new products grapple with the extent to which new offerings incrementalize or substitute consumption of their existing products. Top performing artists contend with this phenomenon when releasing new music. Using panel models with artist fixed effects, we identify that performing artists under 40 are more likely to experience growth in their overall streams when releasing new music. Additionally, based on weeks in the Billboard Hot 100, artists with more popular back catalogs see a greater lift in overall streams with a new release. By contrast, the cumulative volume of past releases, conditional on catalog popularity, does not significantly affect streaming volumes. This has implications for how a performer's growing fanbase and the popularity of their back catalog contribute to a quality signal that enhances the attractiveness of their new releases. This work also highlights how performers later in their careers may be more dependent on other performing elements. 

This study examines the competitive effects of Google Fiber’s entry into the Nashville broadband market. Google’s strategic deployment in economically attractive areas creates an identification challenge that we address using propensity score matching to construct comparable treatment and control groups at the Census Block level, followed by difference-in-differences estimation from 2014 to 2021. We find that Google Fiber’s entry significantly increased local competition, adding approximately 0.17 additional broadband providers per Census Block, and led to substantial service quality improvements, particularly in upload speeds (167.4 Mbps increase) and short-term increases in download speeds (3.1 Mbps to 93.2 Mbps). These improvements were primarily driven by AT&T’s targeted deployment of fiber-to-the-premises infrastructure in Google’s footprint, while Comcast pursued a broader platform upgrade to DOCSIS 3.1 that affected treatment and control areas equally. We attribute these heterogeneous responses to differences in incumbent technology constraints and investment costs, with AT&T’s legacy copper network requiring substantial fiber investment to compete with Google’s gigabit speeds, while Comcast’s cable infrastructure enabled more cost-effective upgrades. Our findings contribute to the literature on competition in network industries and highlight how technology differences shape competitive responses to market entry.