I think the problem was that people didn’t like that it was automatically on their device. I didn’t understand at the time. It was fully deleteable.
Zevon did break through in 1978 with “Werewolves of London” off his Excitable Boy album. Unfortunately, its success was both the best and worst thing to happen since it inaccurately and unfairly tagged him as a novelty song performer.
Yeah. And that would be a good example of a song making it without promotion, because at the time Zevon was virtually unknown and already had two albums (including one of the best albums of the 70’s) sink like a stone. Werewolves of London came out of nowhere, and stayed in the Top 40 for six weeks. The album it was on went to #8 on the album charts due to the strength of that single.
The other bad thing about it was that its success made Warren Zevon enough money that it allowed him to indulge his vices, those being drugs, alcoholism and laziness. He only produced two albums in the next nine years (“Bad Luck Streak in Dancing School” and “The Envoy”), and neither was considered up to the standard of his 70’s work, though some would disagree. In 1987 he got clean and sober, and turned out “Sentimental Hygiene”, a great album that got significant promotion but still didn’t go anywhere. He had a minor dance hit with “Leave my Monkey Alone”, and that’s about it.
It wasn’t until the posthumous “The Wind” that Zevon got any chart traction again, and that was a case of heavy promotion by the Grammy awards, Dave Letterman, and his label along with the heartbreaking story of his death from cancer.
I don’t know, I always saw Zevon as like Santana, a guy who could remain viable and relevant for a long time but never really break big, although Santana finally broke huge, and it was well deserved.
Sure. Zevon wrote complex, literate music. Most of it didn’t necessarily have a good beat that you could dance to. That limited his audience. There are lots of artists like that. John Prine, Leonard Cohen, The Decemberists, etc. Some are reasonably big among college crowds if they’re hip enough, like the Decemberists. Zevon wrote dark music with unsavory characters and/or unpleasant themes. You probably need to be a little offbeat yourself to really get into it.
Santana is one of the few examples of artists *starting off *huge from the very first album. Their first four went to #4, 1, 1, and 8.
Then the personnel changed and the band started having internal conflicts. Even so their next nine straight albums went top 30. What more could you possibly want except for The Beatles?
Like everybody else, I think your OP (original premise) is New Coke levels of wrong. Most bands have a very short lifespan on top of the charts, no matter how strong their core fanbase might be. It takes very little to *not *sell multimillions. A change in personnel, a rushed or delayed album, a change in sound, a shift in the zeitgeist, or just a bad album. The younger the fanbase, the quicker it evaporates. Teen idols collapse when they hit 20. The entire teen idol/boy band/girl group production line has been built on this truth since the 1950s.
What you need to do is try to make a list of the artists - groups or individuals - that didn’t follow this exact pattern for more than a few years. They are extremely scarce. Once you realize how incredibly rare it is to have a series of top ten albums you’ll see that hype is meaningless as a predictor of long-lasting success.
What answer do you want us to give you? Do you want us to tell you there’s a gypsy curse?
Record companies promote their products. But there’s only a limited amount of airplay out there. Radio stations have to decide who to play and who to cut. And they have to keep their audience. So they’re not going to play something just because the record company wants them to.
Music is no different than books or movies or TV series. If production companies could reliably predict what audiences would like, that’s all they would produce. But audiences are a mystery. So production companies have to produce far more products that anyone can look at or listen to in hopes that some small portion of them will be something that will connect with an audience. And the rest gets thrown into the flop dumpster.
Those are both very good posts.
The industry seems to have figured out how to keep young artists strong into adulthood. Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera and Justin Timberlake are still big, and the latest crops(Miley Cyrus, Demi Lovato, Selena Gomez) that came out of Disney are all doing well. I don’t think this is because those artists are better than the teens that came before. I think it’s that the industry didn’t start out with the assumption that they were done at 20.
I think in the past, when airplay was really limited and there was only one major music video channel, that rather than try to figure out what the listening public wanted, they were going to decide what we wanted. The end result was essentially the commercial death of rock n’ roll and the temporary death of true pop music. Music consumers fled from grunge and folk chicks and found that country and R&B and hip hop were more reliable at giving the public what they wanted to hear. Pop came roaring back with the boy bands and the blonde chicks, but rock never recovered from what was actually a very conscious decision by MTV to push alternative and declare everything else to be “irrelevant”. MTV had become so enamored with being the trendsetter that they destroyed their own business model and had to rebuild.
At least that’s my interpretation of the 90s. What I fail to understand is why radio followed MTV’s lead. That led rock and pop radio stations right down the road to ruin. Down here in South Florida, we went from three popular pop stations and three popular rock stations to supporting only one pop and one rock station(classic rock, not modern), and the rest had switched formats to urban or country.
Good discussion. I see what you’re saying, but wonder if it’s a byproduct of being close to what’s happening now. Looking back, boy bands had durable breakout stars like Michael Jackson and Donny Osmond. In a later generation, New Edition had several durable stars/groups.
I there are always durable stars that stand out. But I think Exapno’s basic premise is framed well. As Chris Rock said: Here today…gone today.
It’s all due to a gypsy curse.
Music audiences, especially teen music audiences are notoriously fickle and trends come and go almost at random. Pop stars know this so they cash in while they can. For every Taylor Swift that sticks around there’s a dozen one or two hit wonders that fade away for no rhyme or reason.
Not really seeing that in the last 10 years or so. You can add Beyonce, Rihanna, Katy Perry, Britney Spears, Miley Cyrus, Demo Lovato, Selena Gomez, and Kesha(who is finally recording again) to that list. There’s a lot more staying power now, and I think that goes directly to the breaking of the gatekeepers. Now there are unlimited music options that can easily be accessed, and when supposedly fickle teens have the chance to choose, they do seem to stay loyal to their favorites, while still being open to new music.
Go back exactly ten years and look at who was on top of the Hot 100:
Rihanna, Maroon 5, T-Pain, Justin Timberlake, Linkin Park, Fall Out Boy, Carrie Underwood, Gwen Stefani, and Nickelback. Also in the top 25 are Avril Lavigne and Fergie, who are both set to release albums this year and whose last albums did quite well. I wouldn’t bet against either of them flopping.
I don’t think we’ve ever seen so much stability in the pop music market, actually. Rap seems to be an exception, although rappers always struggle to last more than two albums before being discarded by the fanbase.
So given how things have changed, my original question was, “How did they decide that an artist was done, despite no commercial evidence that the artist was done”? To cite the examples of Gibson and Ocean again, you can’t really say that they failed to catch on with the music consumer, because the average music consumer wouldn’t even have known they had new albums out, whereas today, if you once bought an Avril Lavigne album on Amazon, Amazon will be sure to alert you that she’s got a new one out. If you ever subscribed to her Youtube channel, you’ll get a notification that she’s got a new video up. It’s just so much easier now for artists to make sure that those who were interested in them once are at least aware that they are getting ready to put out new music, whereas in the 80s and 90s the only way people would know is if they heard it on the radio or saw it on MTV.
It’s a fair point. The exponential expanding of media and access may be a partial explanation. It means all artists can be accessed, not a few channels that require vying for play space. It also means an artist can be available in ways they weren’t before, becoming internet celebs and staying in the public eye that way between songs.
In some ways the core of your question is about how things have changed. There is still a value chain, and it is still hugely complex, but it has gone throught seismic structural change in the YouTube/online era.
Boy bands like NKOTB (New Kids) retained a HUGE fan base even as they disappeared off the charts, as did hair metal bands like Poison. When they tour, they pack them in consistently. My point is that enduring careers have been around, even if they aren’t present on the charts. It feels like today’s media access enables artists like Maroon 5, who already sound like a tribute band of themselves, to have durability more than ever was possible.
I agree with WordMan that the structure of the music industry has changed with the advent of streaming. The Billboard charts no loner represent album sales; as of 2014 they changed to a mixture of streaming, sales, and digital tracking. That’s the biggest change since they instituted SoundScan in 1991. The three eras are so different that it’s next to meaningless to make comparisons.
Today’s music industry reminds me of what the publishing industry currently looks like. Bestsellers and dependably bestselling authors obviously existed back in the Beatle era, but they didn’t normally sell in the millions and they didn’t push everybody else off the charts. That started to change in the 1980s when authors were pushed to deliberately write books that looked like and could be promoted as bestsellers. Mystery authors like Ed McBain, Donald Westlake, and Len Deighton once wrote taut, lean 180-page novels that made their names. Now they were asked to write 400-page books that “justified” the high prices being placed on them, in return for huge marketing campaigns. That worked, but in the opinion of the older readers, the books suffered because the authors spread a 180-page plot over 400 pages. They sold in the hundreds of thousands, though.
Today’s bestsellers sell in the millions. James Patterson writes and/or puts his name on a book a month. Each hits number one on the charts. Same for Nora Roberts. A new book by Stephen King or J. K. Rowling is a megaevent. Almost every slot on the New York Times top 15 is from a reliable genre name, with the occasional newcomer. It’s literally news when a literary novel sneaks in. You can watch the literati flutter and swoon. It’s taken for granted that the top 100 bestsellers of the year outsell everything else combined. That means all the hundred thousand trade books put out by all the publishers. The flip side is that churn is enormous. In the 50s and 60s books would often sit at #1 for six months. Today the hot new release goes straight to the top and gets replaced the next week.
Music looks very much the same to me today. The days when *Rumours *and *Thriller *could sit on top for six months are gone. Sgt. Pepper’s and the Monkee’s *Headquarters *were one and two the entire Summer of Love. Adele’s *25 * was a huge outlier when it topped for eight weeks. The guy from *Wired *popularized “the long tail” at the beginning of the Internet and was right, kinda, sorta. He didn’t see that a long tail also meant a short swollen head. Yeah, everybody can sell a hundred books or records. A very few sell or stream a million.
I went back to adaher’s 2007 link. My list would include Plain White T’s, Fergie, Shop Boyz, T-Pain, (he should have used T. I. instead), Timbaland, Daughtry, Lloyd, Huey, Sean Kingston, Elliott Yarmin, and Lil Mama, all from the top 25. You’d probably get that split whenever you searched for an artist he mentioned. IOW, ten who lasted but paired with a hundred or more who didn’t. Which should be exactly what you would expect.
By my count it looks like the majority of the top 25 are still doing quite well. Further down it’s hard to say, since having a #34 isn’t exactly a sign of superstardom. So I’d expect that artists below the top 25 would be less likely to be around ten years later.
It really does appear that artists have longer shelf lives now. And in part that’s because it’s easier as a fan to follow artists you like. In the past you’d only know what the trendmakers wanted you to know. If MTV didn’t want to play your video, you were done. If MTV decided your whole genre was no longer relevant, then your genre ceased to be relevant. I’d note that the record labels did not give up on the 80s hair bands until the late 90s. But with MTV going through an image makeover in the early 90s that did not include traditional pop or hair metal, and with radio either doing modern(alternative) or classic(70s rock), there was no longer any way for 80s metal bands to promote their newest work. There were truly gatekeepers back then. What I don’t understand is why the labels didn’t try to promote their MTV and radio disfavored artists by other means. Seems to me that even something as simple as a TV ad campaign for a band like Winger in 1993 could have moved some sales. According to Wikipedia, Winger’s Pull album was produced with a pretty large budget, yet when MTV basically told Atlantic to get bent, the only place Winger will have on MTV is on Stewart’s T-shirt, Atlantic basically said, “oh, okay, sorry to bother you, we’ll just take a big loss on this album.”