Internet Killed the Radio Star? An Abstract

Abstract

In the current research, we strive to explore the boundary conditions to this long-standing claim that radio airtime leads to better album sales. To this end, we draw from recent literature on celebrity brand management, consumer satiation, and brand identification in order to explicate the interrelationship between musician star power and radio airtime. We build and test a moderated mediation model using a large, proprietary sample of cross-sectional time-series data. We reveal a set of competing effects of how radio airtime may influence music album sales depending on a musician’s star power. On the one hand, lesser known musicians are not as susceptible to the satiation effect caused by radio airtime as famous musicians, and therefore their albums are more likely to take advantage of the direct exposure from radio airtime. On the other hand, radio airtime may also serve as a reminder of past consumption experience which inspires consumers’ social identification with famous musicians, a correlation not as pronounced in the case of lesser known musicians. Online brand identification is in turn associated with increased album sales. These findings provide implications on how label companies may take different approaches when managing the radio promotion campaigns for famous and lesser-known musicians. For more famous artists, it can be a good way to reinvigorate their fan base. However, using radio airtime as the exclusive product promotional tool should be a higher priority for newer artists, due to the potential satiation and dilution effects of repeated music consumption for more famous artists. As famous musicians and their labels are more likely to have the resources to engage in the pay-to-play market than their lesser counterparts, we hope this new finding would invite the industry to reexamine the validity and side effects of this quasi-legal practice.