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
Benefit concert performers took part in concerts to raise donations charitable causes, it was also not unusual in the 18th and 19th centuries for musicians to stage performances to raise funds for their own professional work, such as Ludwig van Beethoven's 1808 "Akademie" concert. The modern understanding of a benefit concert is of a large-scale, popular event put on to support a charitable or political cause. In the modern era, the first benefit concert is generally held to be the Concert For Bangladesh, a programme of two events held at Madison Square Garden in New York City in 1971, which were organized