Are We Sure Maneskin Are Right to Open a Rolling Stones Concert?
Italian media reported with great fanfare that Måneskin will open a Rolling Stones concert in Las Vegas on 6 November. La Repubblica defined it as "sensational news that continues to raise the bar of popularity and success of these four twenty-year-olds from Rome," Corriere "a new success for Måneskin, who are becoming more and more popular across the world," Il Giornale noted that the news "immediately entered the trending topics on Twitter."
A study published last year in Organization Science warns, however, that opening concerts for high-status artists is something young bands should handle with care.
"It is, at the very least, an activity not to be repeated too often and possibly limited to the first years of a band's life," says Fabrizio Castellucci (Bocconi Department of Management), one of the co-authors.
The study concludes, in fact, that "new bands that frequently appeared with high-status artists made less money and were more likely to subsequently dissolve."
Castellucci, Alessandro Piazza (Rice University), and Damon Phillips (Columbia Business School) analyzed the career development of 1,385 bands formed between 2000 and 2005 to understand if they benefited from being warm-up acts at concerts by big artists.
"In this kind of affiliation," Professor Castellucci explains, "two opposing forces are acting: on the one hand, there is a signaling effect that should push the public to associate, in terms of genre and quality, the name of the most famous artists with the name of emerging ones. On the other hand, there is an attention effect, so that the audience's attention is probably absorbed almost totally by the better-known band, with the consequence of not recognizing any distinctiveness in the opening band."
According to the estimates of the three academics, the second, negative effect prevails over the first one, especially when the emerging band persists in supporting other artists several years after its foundation. Bands formed longer ago, in other words, are more likely to be harmed.
The odds of a band dissolving increase by 6.3% for each additional high-status artist whose concerts the emerging band opens. If the number of supported high-status artists increases by 10%, the new band's revenue decreases by 7.7%.
"In the case of Måneskin, though, things might be different," Castellucci says. "First, opening other people's concerts is a harmful activity when repeated for too long, and there are no signs that this should happen in their case. Second, our study does not consider the effects of a marketing campaign like Måneskin's in the United States. In addition to the concert with the Rolling Stones, there was also a guest appearance on The Tonight Show. It is clear that there is a conscious direction behind it."
Alessandro Piazza, Damon J. Phillips, Fabrizio Castellucci, "High-Status Affiliations and the Success of Entrants: New Bands and the Market for Live Music Performances, 2000-2012." Organization Science, 2020 31:5, 1272-1291. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2019.1344.
Photo: Måneskin, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons