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The recording industry for popular singers, 1955–1987, consisted of a lower‐end market for singles and a higher‐end market for albums. The singles market acted as an entry‐level quality filter for the album market. While this two‐tier market system might have led to the “superstar phenomenon” in the Marshall‐Rosen sense, other non‐quality factors, such as the singer's race or musical style, resulted in an imperfect quality filter, possibly explaining why the industry did not exhibit superstardom statistically.
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William A. Hamlen (1994) studied this question.
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