The Concert in Central Park album was released. The film was later released for sale in VHS, CED Videodisc, Laserdisc, and DVD formats. It sold more than 50,000 copies in the US, where it earned Gold certification for a music longform video. It was broadcast on PBS on August 22, 1988, and again on August 8, 2015. The concert and recordings were positively received by music critics. Stephen Holden praised the performance in "The New York Times" the day after the concert; he subsequently praised the live album in "Rolling Stone" magazine. He wrote that Simon and Garfunkel were successful in reviving their sound, that
The Concert in Central Park the backing band was "one of the finest groups of musicians ever to play together at a New York rock concert", and the rearrangements of Simon's solo material were improvements over the originals. Despite the risks in performing so many acoustic ballads in an open-air concert on a cool night, the songs "were beautifully articulated, in near-perfect harmony." An October 1981 review in "Rolling Stone" called the concert "one of the finest performances of [1981]", one that "vividly recaptured another time, an era when well-crafted, melodic pop bore meanings that stretched beyond the musical sphere and into the realms of