TILA = Things I’ve Learned About…
Have you ever purchased the first album from an artist and thought “Wow! This person/group is amazing! I love this album!” after listening to it for the first time? Then, you run out and purchase their follow-up album on the day of its release and once you listen to it, do you wonder “Whoa! WTH?? What happened to the unique sound? Where are the cutting edge lyrics? Who stole their music mojo??” Well, there’s a very good and logical reason for this. Allow me to explain…
Many artists toil in obscurity for many years before they are finally “discovered”. This means they’ve banked years and years of songs that they’ve performed and perfected. Undiscovered artists probably have a repertoire of a hundred songs they’ve written, re-written, thrown away, revived and remixed. These songs were birthed out of their life experiences: people they’ve met, things they’ve done, places they’ve gone and all the varying emotions that accompany them.
So how does this related to the Sophomore Slump? Well, the artist comes to the table with a list of songs that have been identified as fan favorites based on live performance response. The first album is usually a collection of the best of these songs. Most of these musical gems have had a long and arduous evolution before blessing your ears. So by the time you hear it for the first time on the radio, it is the perfected, aged version of a carefully crafted audio offering… pre-discovery.
Unfortunately, in the most traditional sense, “discovery” means an artist was able to obtain a record deal and signed a (initially very un-lucrative) contract to be developed (image reconstruction), marketed (blatantly exploited) and/or produced (tracks, lyrics and sound pre-determined) by a major label. What this does is dilute the very thing that made the artist so groundbreaking in the first place. If it so happens that one of the tracks from the debut album rockets up the charts, you can bet your house that the next album will have songs that sound eerily similar to that hit from before.
What the major labels fail to realize is that a song may be years old and written in a period of musical exploration that the artist has long since left behind. It’s like asking a 35-year old, time-worn former gymnast to bust a triple-somersault with a half twist off the vault and stick the landing. It’s not going to happen. 
And the result is a deeply disappointing second album filled with mediocre retreads that fall far short of the splendor of the first album.
This doesn’t mean an artist has no more good music left to write. It’s just that the Major Label Machine is not as concerned about artistic vision as it is about profit margins. It should be about allowing creative freedom for the artist to freely explore things musically instead of trying to fit them into what the label has decided is a “winning formula”. This is why you’ll find plenty of artists who are musically indistinguishable from one another.
Sadly, with the availability of tools that allow an independent artist to compete directly with major labels, the new trend for labels has been to forgo finding an artist that brings anything to the table other than fitting into a particular marketing demographic. That is why you’ll find very few contemporary singers who have any degree of longevity. The artistry has died.
Two Love Music 