Collecting Autographs: What Do People Collect September 13 2024

CELEBRITY AUTOGRAPHS

A celebrity implies a condition of public recognition and attention from the media. Those who fall into this category are many times asked to sign photos, programs, records and all kinds of objects - sometimes, bizarre ones.

[IMAGE] The celebrated Greek-American soprano Maria Callas at Orly Airport, France, signing a poster with her image, 1958.

There is a large part of collectors that focus on getting celebrity autographs in person, or they purchase them. The latter is obviously the only way to get autographs from deceased celebrities.

Whether you obtain in person or buy or trade, you will certainly fall into one of the categories below. We run a search about what type of celebrity autographs collectors look for, and we categorized them into sports, film, music, politics and more.

Our study used searches done online, using Google, as a measurement of what people are interested in, and we obtained a set of numbers from a tool called SEMRUSH, which provides internet search data on keywords

The keyword “autograph” provided a long list of hits, including some false positives such as the band called autograph, and some results related to hotels, which we eliminated from our study since they are not what we are focusing on. We also counted only keywords that had a minimum volume of 100 searches per month.

We only counted results that were “(name of a celebrity) autograph” and not keywords that were general or not naming a specific celebrity.

SOME NUMBERS

Results are for monthly USA searches on Google, do not cover other countries nor the entire world, or other search engines.

From a total of a thousand celebrity autograph searches by people:

75% were sports personalities
12.2% were singers, mostly pop artists, rap music was top
8.6% movie and TV star autographs, both actors and actresses.
2.75% were world personalities, most of these were US presidents.
1% were writers and literature-related celebrities while Science and exploration, classical music / opera singers were only 0.3% each

[CLICKABLE IMAGE] An original vintage cabinet photo of the famous Russian composer P.I. Tchaikovsky, signed by him in 1887.

This clearly confirms what we already knew about the autograph collecting market in the US, probably similar to results in other countries. Sports autographs are by far the most popular category of celebrity autographs that collectors search for.

Surprisingly, music autographs are around 50% more popular than film and TV star autographs, with a lot of searches for rap and pop music celebrities. And we were also not expecting to see such an overwhelming amount of searches for US presidents, which were the majority (around 70%) of world personality searches.

[CLICKABLE IMAGE] A very interesting and nice sepia-toned photograph signed by the star Italian tenor Enrico Caruso, shown with some other fellow singers including soprano Gabriella Besanzoni, in Havana, Cuba, 1920;

OPERA AND CLASSICAL MUSIC AUTOGRAPHS

Our company focuses on autographs in performing arts, including music, acting and dancing. In the fields of opera and classical music and dance autographs and considering a recently completed period of 18 months, autographs of composers (both photographs and manuscripts) was by far the most popular single category, with around 20% of the total sales, followed by autographs of singers (14%). The rest of the categories are all under 10%, and it was a surprise that programs with famous classical musicians were twice as popular as programs of opera with important singers. These numbers should of course be taken with caution since they are influenced by the variety and size of inventory, and how well Google positions the corresponding categories in search results.

The above information comes from our own research and should be helpful to respond to the above question. We will continue creating articles in this blog that will further add more information and insights into this important topic.