How do albums become commercial flops?

Cafe Society
1

Let me explain what I’m asking here. Everyone understands why a movie flops. The studio invests tons of money, hypes the film to the moon, gets it put in thousands of theaters, and then not many people watch it. But music doesn’t seem to work that way. If an artist is pushed hard by the industry, that artist is successful. So what I want to know is, what is the point of failure that causes an artist to sell 5 million units for one album, and then three albums later the album doesn’t even make gold?

Here’s an example: Debbie Gibson. In 1987, she released Out of the Blue. Huge hit, tons of radio and MTV airplay, big tour. 1989, Electric Youth, same deal. Between Out of the Blue and Electric Youth, MTV was sure to keep us updated on what Debbie Gibson was doing to the point of annoyance. But then just 18 months later, in 1990, she puts out Anything is Possible. Now I was glued to top 40 radio and MTV in those days, so if there had been promotion of this album coming, I would have know about it. But nothing. It just came out, the songs weren’t on the radio much, the videos got pretty much no MTV airplay, and just like that she was a nostalgia act at 20. The exact same thing happened to Billy Ocean three years later. Now granted, Ocean had taken some time off and the music scene changed a lot in just those three years, but this guy was a hits machine and his comeback should have been a pretty big deal. The record company certainly invested enough in his 1993 album. R. Kelly produced two songs on it.

So whereas the point of failure in movies is the viewing public, is the point of failure in music in a different place? At the time, did the radio stations and MTV pretty much control what we got to hear and if they decided you were done, you were done? That’s the impression I get, but it doesn’t seem possible that hundreds of radio stations would get the same idea. Is there something else at play that I don’t know about?

Here’s my followup question: has a single or album ever been widely hyped and then flopped commercially? As in, they got the airplay, MTV played the videos, but fans just rejected it, not buying the album or the singles and not requesting the songs on Total Request Live and such? Or is music one of those things where if they play it, by definition it’s a hit because the public gets the impression that it’s a hit?

2

How big was the hype around Christopher Cross’ Another Page album?

His first album was huge.

3

Garth Brooks at the height of his popularity put out the Chris Gaines album. It was marketed pretty heavily on VH1 and Saturday Night Live and it was suposed to be a pre-soundtrack of a Chris Gaines movie.
It flopped pretty bad and the movie was never made.

4

Another Page was pretty huge. Cross is a great example of MTV basically deciding you’re not going to be big anymore. It seems to me that they had tremendous veto power over artists’ careers back then, and there’s at least one example of them using it malevolently: to kill the Monkees’ comeback in 1987.

5

Here’s a NYT article from 1991 about Debbie Gibson, suggesting that her commercial decline was a case of a teen pop star’s fanbase moving on. It seems like even when the pop star anticipates this happening and tries to make a “mature” album, it’s hard to make it work.

Radio has made use of focus groups since at least the late '70s, I’m guessing it might not be so much a case of “deciding you were done” as your latest single just not doing well with the focus groups. But the music industry is also notoriously shady, so there’s no telling what kind of backroom deals might go into the pushing of one artist over another one.

6

I think all your confusion is because you’ve got a flawed presupposition here:

The industry can hype an artist with all their might, and that won’t make the public like them. They can sign Duffy to a Diet Coke advert, but her supposedly-free-spirited bike ride at night just made everyone cringe.
(Think I’m exaggerating? Cringe away…)

“Three albums later” is probably a 2-5 year span of time. In that time, you’d have lots of other factors: How about the public’s changing tastes? How about the band doesn’t have the same approach, or even personnel? Not to mention the “sophomore slump” where a band had decades to work on their first album, then has to crank out their next one(s) quickly. The Klaxons are often used as an example of a great first effort but after that, “well, they just had no more songs.”

How about the case where the artist isn’t as good anymore? I’m not saying that Debbie Gibson fell into that category… but only because I tried like hell not to listen to her.

7

My husband worked for various record distributors back in the day, and he said it was a running joke that some albums would ship gold and be returned platinum.

8

Gibson’s pretty much the same as she’s always been. The two albums that came after her period of success were on par with what she’d been doing already.

How do they figure out the fanbase has moved on though? I would think that with an artist with a proven record of success, you’d hype it and if it fails then you know it’s time for a change.

It’s interesting that today’s music industry seems far more willing to push teen stars into adulthood. Most of the teen stars since 2000 have decent careers today as adults. Perhaps the industry sensed a missed opportunity with the late 80s crop? I think they just assumed the fanbase would move on, but Gibson’s Anything is Possible album went gold despite very little airplay. It does not actually look like her fanbase was done with her yet. Maybe they internalized that when the next crop came out(Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Jessica Simpson, Justin Timberlake) and showed more patience?

9

Happens all the time, even with established bands. Kiss had four consecutive platinum albums but their next effort, Music from the Elder, failed to even go gold.

10

That album didn’t get promoted well though. The record company hated it.

11

Isn’t it a complex combo of things? The artist, the songs, the promotion machine behind them, the grass roots interest, and then all the environmental factors?

Sometimes a hype machine works, sometimes it gets lucky, and sometimes it doesn’t matter and/or fails. Look at Carly Rae Jepson’s Call Me Maybe - one YouTube video by Bieber lip syncing it, at the behest of their co-manager Scooter Braun, and it got meme’d and hyped and it became a song of the summer. She’s put out stuff since that has done okay, but also clarified that she has decent talent, but it hasn’t been a regular trip to the top of the charts.

12

Hype only works if the product is good. Think about the Bosstown sound. Despite all the hype, the music was not all that good and the names of the bands are only remembered by people who were around that time period.

Then there’s the Brinsley Schwartz hype, for a group that showed a lot of promise (it included Nick Lowe). The fiasco of the promotion killed any chance of success for the group.*
*Briefly, they were supposed to appear for the first time in the US for a big concert at Madison Square Garden. A plane was chartered so British journalists could attend. But Visa problems kept the band out of the US until the day before their concert, and they had to borrow equipment to play. Meanwhile, the charter plane started having mechanical problems over the Atlantic, and as a distraction, they passengers were allowed to drink all they wanted. They arrived in NYC drunk or hungover, and not in a very good mood. The reviews were brutal.

13

Oh yeah, look at Big Star: Alex Chilton (the Box Tops hit “The Letter”) went home to Memphis and found the band. Very hard to break out back then if based outside the mainstream music biz. The only record label in town was Stax, but it was going through huge turmoil. Stax couldn’t promote their first two records so they didn’t get heard and the band withered, even while the music now is held up as excellent.

Sometimes the hype machine is necessary but doesn’t come through.

14

But what I’m asking is, at what point in the process do most albums by established, successful artists fail? Obviously the record company believes in them, that’s why they paid to produce an album. That’s why they released a single. That’s why they filmed a music video. That’s why they paid to have them tour.

So does the album fail when the company tries to get the artist airplay? But if they don’t get airplay, how can they really have failed? It would be like calling a movie a box office flop if it only opened in 10 theaters. It really does seem like a song is a hit simply because it’s played, and it’s not a hit if it’s not. Heck, don’t the singles charts even consider a song a hit in part based on airplay? That sounds rather insane to me. That would be like calling a movie a hit based on how many theaters it was playing in.

15

A breakdown can happen at any part in the value chain. Katy Perry just released an album that has a full court press of hype, and is doing reasonably well in the sense of exposure, but is generally seen to be a package of meh songs and past-due marketing events where she tries to open up and be authentic.

Katy Perry is an excellent music professional by any measure, and is trading on a long successful run, but is generally portrayed as having really missed the mark on this. Her history got her songs played and her release events covered in the media but this album is seen as a failure.

It feels like her promotional machine worked just great, but her material and the current persona she’s presenting didn’t catch genuine interest. So it goes.

16

I think there is a half-life on certain mucisians, and sometimes the industry does tend to push them to hard to produce an album when they don’t really have the material for it yet.

This is becoming slightly less of a factor in an age when your spotify/youtube exposure may be as critical as your radio exposure (and much more than MTV). They can pace themsleves better than the labels can.

As for the OP wr to Debbie Gibson, its really not that hard to figure out why her last album didn’t succeed as well. There’s nothing wrong with it, but Debbie is no longer the cute teen in very 80’s getup. Look at the title track video:

For one thing, the tone is very different. Not bad, but there's a lot of funk undertones I wouldn't have expected from the '80's Gibson. Then there's Debbie herself. She's definitely trying for a sexier, more mature look. Her previous songs her attire played up her youth but not her body (she's wearing sweaters!). It probably wouldn't click with her core audience.

1990 was also a troublesome era - fashion features lingering from the 80’s that were trying very hard to hold on before grunge came in and flanneled everyone to death. This video screams that era.

17

I don’t think that U2 album that was put in everybody’s Itunes account was received well, despite the hype of giving it away for free.

18

A classic example from before the MTV era is the debut album by Moby Grape. They were considered so hot in 1967 that a bidding war started between companies which Columbia won. Everything looked perfect for a success, a fine band with great songs from San Francisco in 1967, a big label that heavily promoted the band. The resulting album was astounding, one of the best of the year, but they made a big promotion blunder: they released almost all the songs of the album on five singles simultaneously, and this marketing gimmick totally backfired: the people got confused and felt ripped off, so the album stalled at #24, and none of the singles was a hit. Today it’s considered one of the best albums of the time (rightly so, I can so much recommend it), but it totally failed commercially. The band carried on, but never recovered. A story of missed opportunities, similar to Big Star’s, with the difference that Moby Grapes’s fate was overexposure, whereas in Big Star’s case it was non-promotion.

19

I agree with Wordman - an album can flop for any number of reasons, and it can succeed without the hype if it is really great.

Consider Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. The album was dumped by the record label because they felt it had no commercial potential. Wilco bought it back from the record company for an absurdly low price, and just put it up for download on their website for free. The hadcore fans downloaded it, discovered it was amazing, and word of mouth grew so strong that the record company bought the album back for much more than they sold it, and it went on to be a big hit.

On the flipside, there have been many artists who got by on the strength of massive promotion, but who then flopped despite continued massive promotion when the quality of their work dropped below some magic threshold.

Then there are people like Warren Zevon, who put out album after album of outstanding material but couldn’t get industry traction because they are assholes, or because they pissed off the wrong people at the wrong time. Today with music being easier to produce and distribute you can go pretty far without major label and industry support, but in the 70’s and 80’s if you couldn’t get on a major label, you were destined to be at best a niche act.

20

Yep. I remember for a brief blip in the early '90s, thrash metal had a surge in popularity, and bands like Megadeth, Slayer, and Anthrax went on huge arena tours.

Few years later, grunge and the “Seattle Scene” hit and that was it for thrash.