Artistic Creation and Intellectual Property

We analyze artistic markets considering three key distinctive features that have been overlooked by the standard analysis on intellectual property. These features are the dynamic link between the current number of young artists and future high-quality artistic creation, Rosen’s superstars phenomenon, and the role played by promotion costs. Introducing them into an overlapping-generations model brings about a new perspective on the consequences for artistic creation of changes in the copyright term, progress in communication technologies favoring market concentration by stars, and the enlargement of markets. The conventional result that longer copyrights always stimulate artistic creation only holds as a particular case.