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    Saturday Night Live performances 
The NBC series Saturday Night Live, which features performances by musicians both famous and obscure as part of its Sketch Comedy format, has long been known as a show whose platform has made many once-unknown musicians into overnight superstars... but it's also known as a show where many other artists have derailed their careers just as rapidly.
  • In 1981, former cast member John Belushi convinced new Show Runner Dick Ebersol to book the Los Angeles Hardcore Punk band Fear, whose frontman Lee Ving was a friend of his, for the Season 7 episode hosted by Donald Pleasence (on October 31, appropriately enough). What followed was a rowdy punk show complete with mosh pit that ended in a riot. Among other things, Ebersol was hit in the chest with a pumpkin, somebody got on stage and shouted "fuck New York!" into the microphone, the crowd of actual punks bused in for the show (which included a young Ian MacKaye, Tesco Vee of the Meatmen, and multiple members of the Cro-Mags) trashed the SNL set, and NBC cut the broadcast short and went to commercial. While the SNL concert has since been described as a "Beatles on Ed Sullivan" moment by the young punk fans who saw it, in the short term it had serious repercussions for the band. Not only was Fear permanently banned from SNL, but they also found it much harder to tour afterward as venue owners who had seen the nationally-televised SNL performance refused to let them use their venues, greatly limiting their career prospects. (Not like the tried-and-true punks of Fear really cared about mainstream success, mind.)
  • Irish singer-songwriter Sinéad O'Connor's performance of "War" on October 3, 1992, in which she tore up a photo of Pope John Paul II while saying "Fight the real enemy!" in reaction to the then-recent sex abuse scandals within the Catholic Church, caused a massive outcry among Catholics that greatly sapped her career momentum in the '90s. The episode's host Tim Robbins refused to acknowledge her at the end of the show, NBC received over four thousand angry phone calls over it, a protest was held outside Rockefeller Center where O'Connor's albums were crushed with a steamroller, the following week's host Joe Pesci said during his opening monologue that he wanted to smack O'Connor for what she did, Frank Sinatra called her a "stupid broad" and threatened to "kick her ass", and Madonna, then in the midst of her Hotter and Sexier Erotica era and no stranger to controversy herself, thought she went too far. The scandal contributed to the sales disappointment of her just-released album Am I Not Your Girl? and her 1994 follow-up Universal Mother, and after the latter, she wouldn't release another album of new material for six years. To this day, reruns of the episode only show the dress rehearsal performance, where she held up a picture of a child from the Balkans (without tearing it up) as an anti-war protest.note  The worst part of it? Her "j'accuse" method was only a decade ahead of its time. When the sex abuse scandals she was criticizing burst open in the 2000s such that the Catholic Church could no longer cover them up, her response amounted to "I told you so." It's generally agreed nowadays that it wasn't the act itself that sank her, but doing it without warning and without context - had she just said something about the sex scandals before tearing up the picture, she might have gotten off better.
  • Ashlee Simpson was expected to be the next Avril Lavigne, following in the footsteps of her big sister Jessica to become a major pop star. Her first album, Autobiography, went triple platinum, and like her sister, she had a successful Reality Show on MTV. Then came her disastrous performance on Saturday Night Live on the October 23, 2004 episode hosted by Jude Law, where she was caught lip-syncing when her band played the wrong song, followed by an embarrassing "hoe-down" when she realized what was happening. An equally disastrous half-time performance at the Orange Bowl a few months later sealed Simpson's fate. While her following album, 2005's I Am Me, was certified platinum and spawned the hits "Boyfriend" and "L.O.V.E.", it badly undersold Autobiography and was ravaged by critics, while her 2008 follow-up Bittersweet World, despite better reviews, suffered from multiple delays and little promotion before bombing upon release, finishing off her music career. Most of her work since has been as an actress and a TV presenter, most notably playing Violet Foster on the short-lived Melrose Place Sequel Series and Roxie Hart in Broadway and West End performances of Chicago.
  • Karmin was a music duo composed of Amy Heidemann and Nick Noonan who built their success with cover songs on YouTube before they were tapped to perform on SNL in 2012, the second YouTube act to do so. While the first, Lana Del Rey, met acidic reviews for her performance, her career managed to come out mostly unscathed; Karmin, however, didn't. On the February 11, 2012 episode hosted by Zooey Deschanel, the group performed "Brokenhearted" and "I Told You So" from their forthcoming debut EP Hello, and were roundly mocked for both Amy's fashion sense and their Pretty Fly for a White Guy tendencies. Critics compared them to Pat Boone and an unironic version of The Lonely Island that was better at dancing and gesturing than they were at singing or rapping, and Hello vanished without a trace when it was released a few months later. Although Amy and Nick got married in 2016, their professional collaboration never recovered commercially from the SNL appearance, as their band subsequently released two full-length albums to minimal attention before going on hiatus in 2017, with Amy moving on to a solo career under the name Qveen Herby. Karmin is now largely remembered as a One-Hit Wonder for their lone Top 40 hit "Brokenhearted".

    Bands/groups 
  • 2 Unlimited had been arguably the most popular Eurodance group of the 1990s, whether at sporting events in America or the pop charts in Europe, but amidst friction between the producers and singers over their creative direction, they disbanded in 1996. Rather than cap the project completely, however, the producers hired two new singers to perform under the 2 Unlimited banner for their third album II, which bombed hard despite its leadoff single charting well in a few countries.
  • 1989's Up by ABC. They were one of the biggest bands of the sophisti-pop movement in the 1980s, but once they ventured into house music on this album, their critical and commercial approval plunged to practically nothing almost immediately. However, the lead single "One Better World", while not successful, is notable for its explicitly pro-gay rights message, making it extremely progressive for a pop song in 1989.
  • Kids in the Street by The All-American Rejects was another rock album that got decent reviews but which failed to make a mainstream impact, due to being released after the genre itself disappeared from the pop charts. Though the band attempted to make a change in sound that followed the indie rock boom of 2012, the only result was alienating their existing fans while failing to make any new ones. The band has not recorded a new studio album since this one failed to get certified.
  • In 1977, Gregg Allman and Cher were a pop music power couple, and so they came together as the band "Allman and Woman" to record the album Two the Hard Way filled with duets and love songs. However, the two's opposing musical styles clashed badly on the album, its supporting tour was cut short thanks to poor ticket sales and fights between the pair's disparate fanbases, and their marriage ultimately collapsed after the affair led to Allman relapsing into drinking. Cher later made a comeback, but the project marked a tipping point for The Allman Brothers Band, preventing their later albums and reunions from seeing the same level of prominence as their early '70s heyday. The deaths of Duane Allman and Barry Oakley in 1971 and 1972, respectively, were also major factors in the band's decline.
  • Aphrodite's Child's 666, a double album conceived and composed by Vangelis that `sent the band into Progressive Rock. The album was completed in 1969, but the band's record company turned it down and wasn't willing to release it until 1972. The band stalled in the meantime. Vangelis didn't want to return to the band's old sound, the rest of the band didn't want to stick with the new sound, and there was no point in recording more albums when the band already had one in limbo. Unable to do anything sensible, the band split in 1971. It didn't live to experience 666 becoming a Breakthrough Hit with an entirely new audience, but Vangelis was free to start a new solo career.
  • Arrested Development's 1992 debut 3 Years, 5 Months and 2 Days in the Life Of... was a 4x-platinum-selling, critically acclaimed smash hit that got them hailed as prophets of Alternative Hip Hop leading a counter-movement against the Gangsta Rap boom. However, despite decent reviews, their 1994 follow-up Zingalamaduni flopped thanks to poor promotion, the decline of Afrocentrism, and the gangsta rap movement taking over the Hip-Hop landscape, making Arrested Development look overly moralistic and behind-the-times. Not only did Zingalamaduni stall the group's US momentum, it caused them to be swiftly forgotten even by diehard hip-hop fans, and they broke up soon after. These days, their name is better known as the title of a television series than the name of a band.
  • British rock band Babylon Zoo, fronted by former Sandkings frontman Jas Mann, scored their Breakthrough Hit in 1996 with "Spaceman" thanks to a remix being featured on a Levi's ad, becoming the fastest-selling debut single in British history. Unfortunately, despite the single being a number one hit, while it peaked at number six, their debut album The Boy With The X-Ray Eyes only spent six weeks on the album charts, followed by two more singles that failed to replicate the success of "Spaceman"note  and critics lambasted them for their unusual mix of space rock, Glam Rock, and Alternative Rock. What killed their career was their second album King Kong Groover, which was poorly received by critics and failed to chart when it was released in early 1999, not to mention the lead single "All the Money's Gone" only peaking at number 46. The planned second single, a cover of Mott the Hoople's "Honaloochie Boogie", was relegated to being a French-only promotional release. The band never recovered from the failure of this and after finishing their tour promoting their second album, they would begin recording material for their third album before deciding to split up in 2000 with Mann moving to India where he spent time working for an aid agency before returning back to the UK and becoming a film producer instead. Since then, the band is now remembered as a One-Hit Wonder with "Spaceman".
  • After two equally successful albums on Republic Nashville produced big hits such as "If I Die Young", "All Your Life", "Better Dig Two", and "DONE.", the sibling trio The Band Perry announced that their third project would be a New Sound Album with flashier pop influences. "Live Forever", the lead single to their intended third Republic album Heart + Beat, was absolutely trashed by fans and critics for being too extreme and different from their previous work, and it bombed so horribly at radio that Republic dropped them with the album never seeing the light of day. The band even deleted nearly all references to "Live Forever" off their social media, to the point that the single was even unavailable on iTunes for a time. In 2016, they signed to Interscope Records — all while fighting rumors that they had abandoned country music entirely, with the band members even saying they only chose Interscope so that they could distribute singles to pop while also having sister label Mercury Records Nashville service their country material. They announced a new album title, My Bad Imagination, but their first Interscope single "Comeback Kid" fared even worse at country radio, and another single titled "Stay in the Dark" made no noise on the AC format. Although initially slated for a 2017 release, My Bad Imagination was stuck in Development Hell well into 2018. While they did issue a New Sound Album electronica EP titled Coordinates in 2018, it came and went without anyone noticing. Given how thoroughly the band seems to have abandoned its core, combined with the highly negative reception to their poppier material, it remains unlikely that The Band Perry will ever return to their "If I Die Young" glory days. The consensus among fans is that the band just got too full of themselves and too pompously wrapped up in their Genre Shift.
  • The Beach Boys seemed poised for a comeback after the massive (if polarizing) success of their 1988 single "Kokomo", a Breakaway Pop Hit from the film Cocktail, but the 1992 album Summer in Paradise destroyed that goodwill immediately. The first Beach Boys album where Mike Love was the driving creative force without any input from Brian Wilson, Summer in Paradise was absolutely thrashed by critics and sold so poorly that it became their first album to not make the Billboard 200 (the all-genre albums chart). Between this and a half-baked covers album by country music stars in 1996, they were reduced to a touring oldies band and wouldn't record a new album of original music until 2012.
  • The New Wave Music band Berlin scored their biggest hit with "Take My Breath Away" for the soundtrack to Top Gun, which won the Academy Award and Golden Globe for Best Original Song in 1986. However, this Black Sheep Hit created a rift in the band between singer Terri Nunn, who liked the song, and bassist and songwriter John Crawford, who hated it. The resulting infighting saw the band break up less than a year after the song was released.
  • Much like the rest of New Edition, Bell Biv DeVoe dominated the New Jack Swing movement throughout the early 1990s. By 1993, however, the genre was on its way out, resulting in their sophomore album Hootie Mack only going Gold, in contrast to its predecessor's Quadruple Platinum certification, and its only hit peaking at a modest #38 on the Hot 100. Though BBD reunited with New Edition for one more successful album in 1996, they were no longer huge names purely in their own right.
  • The critical mauling of The Black Eyed Peas' 2010 album The Beginning, along with their poorly-received Super Bowl halftime performance and the failure of their video game The Black Eyed Peas Experience, badly damaged their career and led to them going on hiatus in 2011. Afterwards, will.i.am’s solo career fell into obscurity in his native US but remained very popular outside it due to his involvement as one of the four coaches in the UK and Australian versions of The Voice. After a couple of singles in 2015 with Fergie (including "#WheresTheLove", a reworked version of their Breakthrough Hit "Where is the Love?") she would leave the group before a follow-up album was finally released in 2018. Despite little fanfare, it was well-received by critics for its Revisiting the Roots sound for the group. The band would take a couple more years to have a resurgence thanks to a Genre Shift to Reggaeton and their song "Ritmo" becoming their first hit in a decade during the COVID-19 Pandemic. Since then, they’ve had far more success in Europe and Latin America. Todd in the Shadows, in his list of the worst hit songs of 2011, goes into more detail.
  • Black Grape, a side project by Happy Mondays frontman Shaun Ryder, saw significant critical and commercial success with their debut album, It's Great When You're Straight... Yeah, which led listeners to believe that Ryder could weather the bad PR from the failure of Happy Mondays' Yes Please! three years prior. However, the follow-up, Stupid Stupid Stupid, saw mixed reviews from critics and although it was a commercial success on its own terms, it considerably undersold compared to its predecessor. Consequently, Black Grape wouldn't release another album until 2017.
  • Boston had a legendary debut album, a capable follow-up album, then took eight years for their third album. Granted, that release, Third Stage sold really well and had two of their biggest hits, "Amanda" and "We're Ready". But Boston then took another EIGHT years to release Walk On, which sold even worse despite going platinum. Since it was now 1994, a band that peaked in the 1970s had an uphill battle to release successful singles. Two songs briefly made the mainstream rock charts but that was it. Despite still being around after Walk On, they firmly became a nostalgia act. None of their subsequent albums have gained certifications and none of their singles have charted.
  • Boyz II Men absolutely dominated the Billboard Hot 100 throughout the entirety of the 1990s, but by the year 2000, R&B had evolved from being represented by earnest love ballads to thugged-out, hip hop-oriented sex and party jams. The two singles from their studio record that year, Nathan Michael Shawn Wanya, were such big flops that neither even came close to the top 40. The record also contained "Bounce, Shake, Move, Swing", an embarrassing foray into electronic disco.
  • The Carpenters' 1977 album Passage saw them attempt to shake up their image after their last two albums underperformed, but simply felt scattershot instead as they tackled a wide variety of genres from jazz to show tunes to Country Music to calypso to Space Rock that were far outside their normal wheelhouse. They only recorded two more albums afterwards, one of them a Christmas album, before Karen Carpenter's death from anorexia nervosa, and they never had another Top 10 single. "I Just Fall in Love Again", however, was later Covered Up by country singer Anne Murray to considerably greater success.
  • 1987's Door to Door ended the career of The Cars. Despite eventually going gold, the album was a sales dud, especially compared to the five multi-platinum albums that preceded it. Meanwhile, critics were deeply disappointed by the album, which they felt was mediocre, formulaic, and half-hearted. First single "You Are the Girl" was a #17 hit in the US, but it fell off the charts quickly and didn't stick around on radio, with its quirky video directed by John Waters being just about the only well-remembered thing about the entire project. The album's other two singles were duds, and the band broke up in February 1988. They wouldn't release another album until 2011, and it would end up being their last — frontman Ric Ocasek died of hypertensive and atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease eight years later. Door to Door was the last release with the classic lineup, as bassist Benjamin Orr had died of pancreatic cancer in 2000.
  • The Clash's 1985 album Cut the Crap was intended as a Revisiting the Roots album, but the loss of drummer Topper Headon and guitarist Mick Jones resulted in manager Bernie Rhodes seizing control of production and pushing it in a synth-driven direction, leading to Joe Strummer suffering a severe case of Creator's Apathy. The resulting album was panned as poorly-produced and creatively disjointed, it hugely undersold, and a depressed Strummer dissolved the Clash a year later. While Strummer and Jones eventually reconciled, the band never reunited before Strummer's death in 2002.
  • Creedence Clearwater Revival's infamous 1972 album Mardi Gras turned out to be their last. Marred by fierce Creative Differences over John Fogerty's control of the music, the album attempted to give each band member A Day in the Limelight, but the result was derided as half-baked and and got barely any play on the radio. The band's final concert ended with them getting pelted by coins and walking off, incinerating what was left of the goodwill in the band and ending it for good. To this day, John is not on speaking terms with Doug Clifford and Stu Cook. He was also still estranged from his brother Tom at the time of the latter's death in 1990.
  • Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young's 1988 album American Dream. Neil Young's relationship with the rest of the band quickly grew tenuous the moment his solo career took off with 1970's After the Gold Rush and 1972's Harvest, causing him to leave the band in 1976 while the rest continued on as just Crosby, Stills, and Nash. By The '80s, however, Young's career was bottoming out as his music grew more experimental while CSN was enjoying a Career Resurrection following their 1982 album Daylight Again, causing Young to decide that he would finally rejoin the band provided that David Crosby kicked his drug habit. After serving nine months in prison on drug charges in 1985 and '86, Crosby got clean and Young kept his promise, but given Young's mercurial tendencies, he wound up being allowed to direct most of the project in order to keep him from walking out. American Dream was heavily hyped as their long-awaited reunion and comeback, but while initial sales were excellent, the album itself, a disjointed mess leaden with awful lyrics and production that lacked any sense of sonic cohesion, was later described by Young's own biographer as "the most wretched album [he] has ever lent his name to... a digital nightmare completely ill-suited to the folk-pop quartet." With the exception of Young, even the band's members themselves hated the album. Young would subsequently ditch the band, turn his own career around in the late '80s and '90s, and emerge as an elder statesman of rock, but the rest of the band spent its days playing the nostalgia circuit until their official breakup in 2015.
  • You can tell the creativity had dried up for the Dead Kennedys with their final album, 1986's Bedtime for Democracy. The band had just survived a bitter obscenity trial for including a poster of H. R. Giger's Penis Landscape with their previous album, 1985's Frankenchrist, one that left frontman Jello Biafra's label Alternative Tentacles nearly bankrupt, and going into their next album Bedtime for Democracy, they were drained. Even the band themselves seem to realize it, the song "Chickenshit Conformist" serving up a blistering damnation of a dried-up punk scene and, in hindsight, almost a prediction that the Kennedys didn't have long left. Biafra would soon split away from the band and start his own collaboration projects and spoken word albums.
  • After a four-year absence and being dropped by Warner (Bros.) Records after the mediocre Shout album (an album that relied too heavily on a synth sound, which turned people off) Devo signed to Enigma and were asked to produce a standard pop and dance album. Total Devo stayed away from Devo's typical weirdness and what we got was a homogenized schlock with very little value. To put things into perspective, Enigma signed one of the most creative bands in history and asked them to sound like everyone else. There's a couple of decent songs but most are skippable, including an uninspired cover of "Don't Be Cruel" that they do absolutely nothing with. Devo's covers have always revolved around making the song unrecognizable to the original in style but it's just a straight cover instead.
  • Dexys Midnight Runners followed up their 1982 international hit album Too-Rye-Ay with Don't Stand Me Down in 1985, an expansive experimental soul album. It was mauled by critics and didn't sit too well with their fans, who wanted another "Come On Eileen". An actual single from the album wasn't released until several months after the album was, and the single chosen — "This Is What She's Like" — was twelve minutes long. The band was gone soon afterward. Don't Stand Me Down has since gained far more acclaim than it had when it initially came out. When Dexys returned in 2012, they and leader Kevin Rowland were significantly more humble than the band that had such lofty artistic aspirations in 1985.
  • Digable Planets was an up-and-coming jazz-rap group who were well on their way to stardom thanks to cross-genre appeal of their single "Rebirth of Slick (Cool Like Dat)" and debut album Reachin' (A New Refutation of Time and Space). Then their second album, Blowout Comb, bombed despite critical acclaim, likely due to its more sociopolitical and Afrocentric themes. The band disbanded soon after.
  • Dire Straits' On Every Street, released in 1991, was the follow-up to the massively successful Brothers in Arms album from 1985. While the album was highly anticipated, the reviews were underwhelming. The lengthy supporting tour was also a miserable slog. Frontman Mark Knopfler, who had been arm-twisted into reforming the band and releasing the album by his record company, finally broke up the band for good after the tour was completed. However, two tracks were Covered Up by country music artists: “The Bug” by Mary Chapin Carpenter, and “When It Comes to You” by John Anderson, whose version even had Knopfler on lead guitar.
  • Although it was a moderate commercial success, the 1999 single "National Express" ended up doing permanent damage to the career of The Divine Comedy, as the perceived class snobbery of its Buses Are for Freaks lyrics finally gave critics who'd always hated Neil Hannon for his aristocratic background some ammunition.
  • Eagles have been hit with this twice.
    • When "Take It to the Limit" became a hit, frontman Glenn Frey pushed bassist Randy Meisner to perform the song during live performances, as he was the only member of the band who could consistently hit the high notes. Meisner grew increasingly disgruntled with having to sing it at every show, culminating in a backstage fistfight between him and Frey during the Hotel California tour in 1977 that led Meisner to quit the band. The rest of the band broke up three years later after the "Long Night at Wrong Beach" when tensions between Frey and Don Felder boiled over at a concert in Long Beach, California and the two of them threatened physical violence against each other after the show. The Eagles only stayed together long enough to finish the concert tour and record a live album before going on a fourteen-year hiatus.
    • The band reunited in 1994 (sparked mainly by the success of Common Thread, a covers album put out by multiple Country Music artists), but Felder was forced out of the band in 2001 and sued them as a result. The band seemed effectively done again after Frey succumbed to complications from rheumatoid arthritis, acute ulcerative colitis and pneumonia in 2016 — but, in spite of Henley announcing that the Eagles would not continue without him, they performed several concerts in 2017 featuring Frey's son Deacon and country singer Vince Gill and have been touring frequently since then.
  • Echo & the Bunnymen were done in as a mainstream force by the failure of Reverberation. Following drummer Pete de Freitas' death in a motorcycle accident and Ian McCulloch's departure to pursue a solo career, the band opted to replace Ian with Northern Irish singer Noel Burke and continue the psychedelic-tinged Alternative Rock style of their 1987 Self-Titled Album. However, the album was lambasted by fans, critics, and McCulloch himself as indistinct, and failed to chart in either the UK or the US; WEA dropped them in 1991, and the band would break up two years later. While they eventually reformed, they would never again reach their 80s levels of mainstream prominence.
  • The Works duology started the slow and painful demise of Emerson, Lake & Palmer. During the albums' recordings, relations between the three began to break down due to a combination of creative differences and exhaustion from being constantly mocked by the music press. By 1978, the three had completely lost their desire to continue the band, but were legally required to record one more album in order to finish their contract to Atlantic Records. The resulting album, Love Beach, abandoned their trademark Progressive Rock sound in favour of disco and AOR, was utterly panned by fans and critics alike and disowned by ELP themselves, and the trio disbanded the following year.
  • The huge failure of Extreme's Waiting for the Punchline led to the band going on hiatus, setting the stage for frontman Gary Cherone's infamous stint with Van Halen.
  • Fall Out Boy's 2008 album Folie à Deux didn't come close to the Platinum-selling success of their prior two albums, 2005's From Under the Cork Tree and 2007's Infinity on High, or even that of their 2003 debut Take This to Your Grave. It endured a Troubled Production, debuted at #8, and sold less than a third of what Infinity did, and just one song, the lead single "I Don't Care", made it into the Billboard Top 40, whereas both Cork Tree and Infinity each managed to get two (and all of them in the Top 20, which "I Don't Care" just missed). What's more, fans hated the album and rejected its departure from their Pop Punk and emo roots in favor of greater theatricality, more elaborate composition, and heavier themes, and would boo the band when they played songs from it on their tour (a tour meant to support the album, mind), which Patrick Stump compared to being "the last act at the vaudeville show" and getting pelted with vegetables. A botched release that saw it delayed by over a month to avoid getting overshadowed by the US Presidential election at that time, which put it in direct competition with a murderer's row of highly anticipated albums, didn't help either. The band went on hiatus in 2010 shortly after finishing the tour, and its members fell into a funk and pursued failed solo projects before reuniting in 2012 and enjoying a Career Resurrection with the 2013 album Save Rock and Roll.
  • The First Class followed their self-titled 1974 debut album, featuring the hit "Beach Baby," with SST two years later, which sold so poorly that they broke up shortly thereafter.
  • While Foghat has remained together to this day except for one hiatus in the mid-1980s, the poor reception of Tight Shoes in 1980 killed off their commercial relevance and they never made any sort of comeback afterwards.
  • While The Fray was never a favorite with critics, they had a series of successes on top 40 and adult contemporary radio in the late 2000s. Scars & Stories was their first to not reach any certification or produce a top 40 hit, although lead single "Heartbeat" was successful on adult alternative radio. Helios, released two years later, fared even worse. They haven't released an new album since with the only notable release being a Greatest Hits Album in 2016.
  • While it did score their highest charting single since 1999, Garbage's fourth album Bleed Like Me divided critics for its more Post-Grunge driven sound and sales of the album didn't match the likes of their first two albums. It didn't help that it suffered from a Troubled Production that prompted them to briefly split and they went on hiatus after abruptly cancelling the remaining dates of the tour promoting their album. While they have since reformed and their subsequent albums have been well received by critics, they have yet to hit the heights of their heyday since.
  • The departure of Phil Collins in 1996 and the release of ...Calling All Stations... the following year ultimately killed Genesis. After the release of their 1986 smash hit album Invisible Touch, the band entered a period of gradual decline due to the growing backlash against Collins' over-saturation of the pop charts (not helped by the fact that he had an extremely successful solo career) and the rise of Alternative Rock that would take over much of the rock charts of the '90s, not to mention growing disagreements within the Genesis fanbase over whether or not Collins could match the legacy of former lead vocalist Peter Gabriel, who had left in 1975 and been replaced by Collins. Five years after the release of the 1991 album We Can't Dance, which sold well but generated only one Top 10 hit single, "I Can't Dance", in the US, Collins decided to quit Genesis to focus on his solo opportunities, leaving Mike Rutherford and Tony Banks, neither of whom were experienced with lead vocals, as the only remaining members of the band. In an effort to stay relevant in the '90s, the band hired Post-Grunge musician Ray Wilson, who was the frontman of Scottish band Stiltskin, to take over lead vocals and rushed out ...Calling All Stations..., which consisted primarily of pop tunes with cheesy lyrics and awkward fusion with alternative rock and art rock. Neither critics nor fans of Genesis liked the album one bit, and it ended up becoming the lowest-rated album of the band's discography. After a concert tour promoting the album bombed, Genesis formally split up, with only two one-off reunions that did not include any material from ...Calling All Stations....
  • Talk Show, the third album by early '80s new wave juggernauts The Go-Go's. Though it yielded two top 40 singles and was slightly better-received than their previous record Vacation, it sold poorly, and after replacing guitarist Jane Wiedlin, who left in October 1984, the band broke up due to internal conflict. Frontwoman Belinda Carlisle went on to enjoy a highly successful solo career, while Wiedlin had a hit song of her own with "Rush Hour". They ultimately reformed in the late '90s and released one more album in 2001, but by that point, their moment was long over. Nowadays, they hardly play anything from this album during live performances.
  • The recording of Guns N' Roses' cover of "Sympathy for the Devil" for the Interview with the Vampire soundtrack caused tensions that had long been boiling between Axl Rose and the rest of the band to snap. Axl attempted to micromanage the song's production, with Slash recounting that he demanded that the guitar be played note-for-note as Keith Richards did on the original. When he was unhappy with Slash's version, Axl had his friend play over Slash's part. Slash left the band shortly afterward, followed shortly thereafter by Gilby Clarke, who was upset that he hadn't been called in to help record the song at all, especially given his love of the Stones. GNR would only record one album of original material, the notoriously-delayed Chinese Democracy in 2008, in the two decades it took Axl and Slash to reconcile. His and longtime bassist Duff McKagan's return in 2016 did not resurrect the band as no new albums have come about.
  • Yes Please! by Happy Mondays was such a train wreck it is one of many things that caused Factory Records to go into bankruptcy. The band at the time was headed by a recovering drug addict Shaun Ryder and managed to convince the label to let them record the album in Barbados. But before they got there, Ryder somehow lost all the methadone he was supposed to take with him. The recording of the album took way longer than expected. When the Mondays returned to Manchester, Shaun held the master tapes hostage and threatened to destroy them unless he got some money. The record label caved in to his demands and paid him a staggering 50 pounds (for Americans, that's about $65 today) for the tapes. And when Factory finally listened to the recordings they discovered there weren’t any vocals. Ryder did not write or record any. They were added later.
  • The Hawthorne Muchachos were ascending the ranks of Drum Corps International when they were disqualified for marching an overage member just prior to the 1975 DCI Championship Finals. The corps never made it back to Finals and folded three years later.
  • All-American Nightmare marked the beginning of the end of Hinder's rock stardom, despite the Title Track peaking at #6 on Mainstream Rock, as Post-Grunge fell out of favor in The New '10s.
  • Hootie & the Blowfish's second album, 1996's Fairweather Johnson, is remembered as a textbook example of a Sophomore Slump. Rushed out to cash in on the record-breaking sales of Cracked Rear View, the album was widely regarded as an uninteresting retread despite its critical and commercial success (the former of which was regarded in hindsight as an attempt to avoid offending fans, especially since Rolling Stone fired a writer for panning the album). The band's fanbase moved on to other adult alternative acts, and Hootie's Top 40 success would quickly dry up. However, more than a decade later, lead singer Darius Rucker would catch a second wind with a successful Country Music career.
  • After the post-hardcore band Hum scored some unexpected success with You'd Prefer An Astronaut in 1995, the band spent waiting nearly three years before they released their follow-up, Downward Is Heavenward. The album was a commercial failure in comparison to its predecessor, and the band's label, RCA, lost a great deal of money trying to promote it. Partially because of the album's inability to reach an audience, the band broke up shortly afterward. However, over the years the album has come to be recognized as not only Hum's masterpiece but as one of the best albums of the '90s.
  • The Human League's 1986 album Crash, despite generating the band's second US No. 1 hit and a fan-favorite single with "Human", quickly killed off the group's relevance in the American market after previous attempts at following up their blockbuster success Dare saw increasingly diminishing returns. Crash leaned into the band's longtime funk and R&B influences to catch up with changing trends in dance music, but Creative Differences with producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis resulted in mutual Creator's Apathy. The album was widely panned as generic and uninteresting, sales quickly dropped off, and the band's success afterwards was heavily limited and mostly relegated to their native UK.
  • The Jacksons made out quite well financially from their troubled Victory tour. But, to the unpleasant surprise of everyone but him, Michael announced after the last show that the brothers would never tour together again. They and their father had been planning to do another leg of shows in Europe. But Michael was right, as he had a massively successful solo career.
  • British pop duo Jemini participated in the 2003 Eurovision Song Contest with their song "Cry Baby". Unfortunately, their off-key performance (which they blame on a technical fault that made them unable to hear the backing track) led to them not only finishing in last but getting the dreaded nul points. Following their Eurovision failure, their label dropped them, their album was never released, and they split up the following year.
  • Kill Hannah were a band who were fairly well-regarded and built up a cult following in the indie rock scene for their unique mix of Electronic Music with elements of Shoegazing and Post-Punk, compounded by singer Mat Devine's breathy Dream Pop inspired vocals. Their singles "Kennedy" and "Lips Like Morphine" were used in quite a few youth-oriented shows such as One Tree Hill, which compounded their fandom. The band was due to release a new album on a major label in 2013, but Mat Devine was attempting to become a Broadway star and the band ended up never recording the songs due to being tied down by their continued touring as well as Devine's continued performances in Broadway. They finally called it quits in 2016, after 18 years as a band.
  • The Knack followed up their 1979 hit album Get the Knack and #1 hit single "My Sharona" with ...But the Little Girls Understand the following year. The album was critically eviscerated (though it went gold in two months), and despite releasing a couple more albums before they broke up, those releases never troubled the pop charts and were released with almost no fanfare.
  • Britpop band Kula Shaker, despite being loathed by critics for their style, were a moderately-successful band in the 1990s. However, the band's career was derailed when lead singer Crispen Mills admitted to hoping the Swastika would be reused for its positive mystical meanings during a newspaper interview. Some research then discovered that Mills' previous band The Objects of Desire had included a former member of the far-right National Front party (who had dated Mills' mother), and had played at a conspiracy theory conference in London that had also neo-Nazis among the speakers. While Mills did apologize for his comments later on and ridiculed neo-Nazi ideology, the band broke up in 1999 from the fierce backlash, before reuniting in 2004 to slim success.
  • A literal killer occurred with Linkin Park frontman Chester Bennington, who died by suicide two months after the release of the band's 2017 album One More Light, which earned polarized reviews from critics and fans alike due to its pop-oriented sound — a reaction that Bennington had not taken well. This was compounded by the sudden suicide of his friend Chris Cornell after a concert days before One More Light's release. After this, and a one-time show in October in his memory, Linkin Park remain officially on hiatus.
  • The 2016 mockumentary and accompanying soundtrack album Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping saw The Lonely Island, a musical comedy trio comprised of Andy Samberg, Akiva Schaffer, and Jorma Taccone, attempt to parlay their success of their Saturday Night Live Digital Shorts to a feature film. While the film got great reviews, and both it and its album remain Cult Classics among the group's fans, it was an Acclaimed Flop that made back less than half its budget. They only made one more Digital Short afterwards (a 2018 sequel to "Natalie's Rap"), their next project went directly to Netflix, Samberg would pivot to acting full-time with the success of the sitcom Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and Schaffer and Taccone would mostly remain behind the scenes as writers, directors, and producers.
  • Welsh rock band Lostprophets immediately disbanded when frontman Ian Watkins was charged with predatory child molestation in 2012 and sentenced to 29 years in prison. The rest of the band has since disowned the Lostprophets name, and started over as No Devotion with Thursday frontman Geoff Rickly.
  • Madison Avenue, an Australian-based pop group helmed by singer Cheyne Coates and DJ Andy Van Dorsselaer, rose to fame with a pair of hits in 1999, including "Who The Hell Are You?" and "Don't Call Me Baby". Despite riding a wave of popularity with their debut album, their success evaporated virtually overnight after Cheyne's diva antics and disastrous performance at the 2000 Australian ARIA Awards, the most prestigious music event in the country. The night started badly for her after she was caught rolling her eyes after Van Dorsselaer accidentally stepped on the back of her dress when they walked to the stage to pick up an award for Single of the Year. Afterward, the group performed a medley of their hits. Aside from singing out-of-tune through the entire performance, Coates called for a glass of water midway through the set. As guests looked on, she proceeded to set it down at the front of the stage and left it there for the rest of the performance, even pausing at one point to pick up the glass and drink from it in the middle of a choreographed dance sequence. Her diva antics became an instant punchline in the Australian media, and the band never recovered from the incident, disbanding in 2002 after attempting to produce a second record. While Coates did attempt to have a solo career, her album failed to produce any traction and she left the music industry soon after to become an interior designer. The ARIA Awards incident is so infamous that, nearly two decades on, it's still used as a punchline on social media.
  • While Madness were one of the premier acts of the 2 Tone movement in the late '70s and transcended that genre to become one of the most successful pop groups in Britain (they spent more weeks in the charts in the entire decade than any other band except UB40) and Europe in the early '80s, by the mid-'80s, not only was their critical and commercial approval in decline, but the band's creative differences caused them to break from Stiff Records and form Zarjazz, a sub label of Virgin Records. Their first Zarjazz album Mad Not Mad - which lead singer Suggs would later describe as "a polished turd" - flopped and they disbanded a year later. Much like Blondie, they ultimately had a comeback in 1999 that was spearheaded by a big hit single, though they were never as huge as they were during their late-'70s/early '80s peak.
    • In 1988, they launched a failed attempt to resurrect the band with a new lineup (as The Madness) after they officially broke up. Though the new album was intended as a more mature record, it fared even worse than Mad Not Mad and definitively put the band on ice for a decade, not least because half the original band hadn't been invited to participate and felt betrayed by the others.
  • Following the commercial decline of AC/DC and Little River Band at the dawn of the MTV era, Men at Work quickly emerged as the biggest musical act from Australia. Far more than what the enduring, borderline-novelty #1 smash "Down Under" would lead modern audiences to believe, they were anything but one-hit-wonders throughout the early 1980s, not only dominating the Australian pop scene at the time but also scoring five top 40 hits, two #1's, and two huge-selling albums in America, where they played a central role in both the rise of New Wave Music, as well as the Australia craze that decade. Unfortunately, due to the severe creative friction between the band members, their time in the spotlight would hardly last more than a few years. Things came to a head during the Troubled Production of their third LP, Two Hearts, by which point drummer Jerry Speiser and bassist John Rees had been unceremoniously kicked out in favor of session musicians and drum machines. Amidst the ongoing rivalry between frontman Colin Hay and instrumentalist Greg Ham, guitarist Ron Strykert jumped ship before the record was finished. The album's abysmal critical and commercial reception proved to be the last straw, with only one charting single (which didn't even make the top 40 in America and only got to #37 in Australia) and no certification except a Gold in the US. Unsurprisingly, the band broke up immediately after the album's failure, with Colin Hay subsequently establishing himself as a respected solo act in the indie scene.
    • A more tragically literal case of this occurred when Greg Ham passed away shortly after the band lost a court case accusing them of plagiarizing the hook from the Australian folk song "Kookaburra" for their signature "Down Under". Though it only comprises a small fraction of the piece, Ham plays the opening notes of "Kookaburra" on flute multiple times throughout "Down Under". Despite the lawsuit being filed nearly three decades after the release of "Down Under", which came out back when original writer of "Kookaburra", Marion Sinclair, was still alive (she never pursued action herself for the rest of her life), the Federal Court of Australia controversially sided with Larrikin Music, which inherited the rights to the song in 1990, following Sinclair's passing in 1988. It's widely believed that the crippling guilt Ham felt in the aftermath of the ruling was the primary factor in his failing health and untimely death.
  • Metallica's 2003 album St. Anger marked the moment when the Thrash Metal legends fell from their lofty perch as titans of rock. It endured a Troubled Production marked by James Hetfield's rehab-induced Creator Breakdown and consequent Creative Differences with his hard-partying bandmates, all documented in the much-better-received 2004 rockumentary Some Kind of Monster, and while the final product debuted at No. 1 in fourteen countries and sold six million copies worldwide, it was criticized as overly long, monotonous, and poorly produced. Its hollow drum sound was especially mocked, and Hetfield's highly personal lyrics were derided as corny and hamfisted. Their next three albums sold well and marked a return to their thrash metal roots.
  • Milli Vanilli's career came crashing to the ground in 1990 when it was revealed that the faces of the band were not only lip-syncing during live shows, but had never recorded the vocals on the album at all, the songs having actually been sung by other artists in the studio (who, after the controversy, recorded an album of their own as The Real Milli Vanilli). This was enough for the duo to have their Grammy for Best New Artist revoked, and more broadly, the affair triggered a strong backlash against dance-pop that lasted well into The '90s and fueled the growth of adult alternative during that decade.
  • Head, both the soundtrack and the film itself, killed the The Monkees' careers in the aftermath of their TV show being cancelled. Despite its modern status as a cult classic psychedelic exploitation film in the same pantheon as Yellow Submarine, it was a critical and commercial disaster at the time of its release due to the band's catch-22 of wanting to break from their carefree, family-friendly origins while still being dismissed as a manufactured joke by the counterculture scene. Unable to find a sizable audience, the film bombed at the box office and the soundtrack failed to produce any top 40 hits. Crippled further by the subsequent departure of Peter Tork, the band's next few albums went by with virtually no fanfare, and they finally broke up in 1971, although they reunited on multiple occasions until the death of Mike Nesmith in 2021 (which, coupled with the deaths of Davy Jones in 2012 and Peter Tork in 2019, left Micky Dolenz as the last surviving Monkee).
  • Morbid Angel had been one of the most popular and acclaimed death metal acts around for most of their career, but they hit a decidedly low point with their 2003 album Heretic, which was derided for its awful production, poor songwriting, and large amounts of filler. After that, the band more or less fell off the radar for a long while aside from the release of a new song. Then Illud Divinum Insanus hit in 2011, with no small amount of hype, and it was not the album fans had been waiting for. The straight death metal songs were by far the album's best, and even those were far below their usual standards, while the other tracks ranged from Lamb of God-esque post-thrash to outdated industrial buttrock, worsened by David Vincent's degraded voice and the weak lyrics. Even drummer Pete Sandoval, who didn't play or write anything on the album, had no love for it. While the band still does well live, Illud stained Morbid Angel's reputation so badly all the band members aside from Trey Azagthoth left, and the band reformed with former vocalist Steve Tucker for their next album Kingdoms Disdained in 2017.
  • Mötley Crüe's 1997 album Generation Swine. The Alternative Rock revolution of The '90s already hadn't been kind to the kings of '80s Hair Metal, with their 1994 Self-Titled Album coming off at the time as desperate due to its Genre Shift to alternative, especially given how they'd replaced their lead singer Vince Neil with John Corabi. (Retrospective reviews, however, have been kinder to it.) As a result, for their next album they rehired Neil and promised a return to form that would combine their classic sleaze with modern edge. Instead, they delivered a disjointed mashup of those two things, after a recording process that everyone involved described as miserable in which nobody agreed on what direction to take the album. Afterwards, the band got into a nasty feud with the head of their label Elektra Records, blaming her for the album's failure in a manner that made them come off as prima donnas. After Generation Swine, Crüe cut ties to Elektra and largely settled into becoming a touring act and elder statesmen of metal, with their subsequent albums (both released under their own label, Mötley Records) selling mainly to nostalgic fans rather than attaining the mammoth success of their '80s Glory Days.
  • Nickelback was always a whipping boy among music nerds, who saw them as the face of a creatively stagnant Post-Grunge scene and a symbol of everything wrong with rock music in the 2000s, but none of that ever stopped them from becoming the biggest rock band of the 2000s (at least in North America). That is, until their commercial success finally came to a halt with 2011's Here and Now, which came out right around the time that hard rock as a whole ceased to be a mainstream genre of music — a process that many blamed Nickelback for due to the omnipresence of them and bands like them on the radio. Tellingly, two years later they released a Greatest Hits Album. After that, their 2014 album No Fixed Address attempted a Genre Shift towards funkier pop rock, to no avail and even worse commercial performance.
  • 2012's Push and Shove proved to be a failed comeback attempt for No Doubt, despite receiving decent reviews from critics. Gwen Stefani's This is What the Truth Feels Like didn't fare much better, despite her stint as a judge on The Voice.
  • N.W.A's 1991 sophomore album Niggaz4life (often Bowdlerised as "Efil4zaggin") was recorded after Ice Cube left the group on bad terms owing to royalty disputes with their manager Jerry Heller, which resulted in multiple diss tracks exchanged between him and the rest of the band, including on this album. While it topped the charts, reviews were deeply divided, with Dr. Dre's production coming in for praise but the lyrics seen as having abandoned the social commentary of their debut Straight Outta Compton in favor of cranking up the violence, misogyny, and gangster swagger. Not only did both conservative Moral Guardians and civil rights activists condemn the album, but more importantly, tensions within the band continued to deepen, with Dr. Dre being the next one to go solo and also getting into a cycle of diss tracks with his former bandmates (especially Eazy-E, by that point the band's de facto leader). The band's members ultimately made up after Eazy-E's death in 1995, but between conflicting schedules and the fact that they were all at separate record labels by that point, a planned comeback album titled Not These Niggaz Again ultimately never got off the ground.
  • Oasis' 1997 album Be Here Now both snapped the momentum they'd built off of their first two albums and acted as a Genre-Killer for the Britpop movement that they helped spearhead. Marred by the band's escalating cocaine addiction and their clout growing out of control, the album's initial rave reviews belied a massive Hype Backlash that eventually translated to retrospective critical panning, deriding it as a bloated mess indicative of the Gallagher brothers' dysfunction. In hindsight, the album's initial critical positivity is seen as overcompensation for the press's It Will Never Catch On attitude towards its predecessors. The band kept going until 2009, but never recouped their titanic 90s success.
  • While The Offspring's Conspiracy of One wasn't regarded by many as a great album, it was successful. Splinter, however, was mediocre and unsuccessful. They just kept on being mediocre since then although that was only two albums. To be more specific, after the success of "Pretty Fly for a White Guy", Offspring recorded and released a handful of 'silly' songs of that particular song's ilk for their Americana and Conspiracy of One albums. Those 'silly' songs, however, were still well-received mostly. Then for Splinter, they seemed to crank their silliness to new heights. That's at least one reason why the vast majority of that album fell flat and just flat out did not work in the songs' final product.
  • By 1996, the Synth-Pop movement that Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark had dominated for so long was long past its peak, prompting them to flirt with Britpop, which was at the height of its influence at the time. The resulting album, Universal, produced one decent hit in their native UK, but was nonetheless a critical and commercial failure, prompting frontman Andy McClusky to put the band on ice for a decade, during which he founded and managed Atomic Kitten. While OMD have been relatively successful for a legacy act since reforming in 2006, none of their post-comeback albums have been certified, nor have they scored any hit singles.
  • Pink Floyd's 1983 album The Final Cut has a lot of parallels with Styx's Kilroy Was Here. The album was a vanity project Concept Album by Roger Waters that the other members were dead-set against, with Waters taking so much control that the album was credited as "By Roger Waters, performed by Pink Floyd". The tensions between Waters and guitarist David Gilmour boiled over, with the two of them recording their parts in different studios. Waters finally left the band after its release, declaring the band "a creatively spent force". This was the end of the Waters-led incarnation of the band. Pink Floyd subsequently reformed without Waters to massive success. Waters had his own career setbacks but subsequently reunited with the band for a one-off performance at Live 8 in 2005.
  • The Japanese pop duo Pink Lady started out as teenagers after winning the talent competition Star Tanjo! in 1976. They scored #4 on the Oricon charts with their debut single "Pepper Keibu", followed it up with several more, their own anime, and a movie, then scored a hit in the United States with "Kiss in the Dark". However, in early 1980, they were caught in a scandal involving a New Year's special and a school for the blind.What happened?  Then they tried to save their careers by eyeing the States once again with Pink Lady and Jeff, which killed not only their careers but also the entire variety show genre in the US. After four part-time reformations, they reunited for good in 2010 and have been active ever since.
  • The Police's 1983 album Synchronicity was recorded as Sting was embarking on a successful solo career, and his growing dominance of the band left his bandmates Stewart Copeland and Andy Summers increasingly disillusioned at their shrinking roles. Despite it being the band's most successful album, including producing one of their Signature Songs in "Every Breath You Take", its Troubled Production caused relations within the band to turn to outright hostility (for starters, everybody recorded their parts in separate rooms because they couldn't stand each other), and they broke up three years later while in the process of recording what would've been their sixth album.
  • Public Enemy saw their fame take a beating in 1994 with of the release of their fifth studio album Muse Sick-n-Hour Mess-Age. While it gave the group their first and only Billboard Top 40 single "Give It Up", the album was strongly criticized by reviewers and fans claiming the group got out-of-touch with the world they helped pioneer, as well as the rhymes attacking gangsta rap. As a result, Public Enemy took an extended hiatus.
  • Released at the tail-end of the post-grunge movement, Puddle of Mudd's Volume 4: Songs in the Key of Love and Hate peaked at a measly #95 on the Billboard 200, despite two #6 Mainstream Rock hits. The band has been completely irrelevant ever since, even in the niche market.
  • Jarvis Cocker had started to grow resentful of the fairweather fandom that came after Pulp's 1995 album Different Class, and in response created a very dark album well away from their "Common People" peak. While This Is Hardcore was a critical success, it ended Pulp as a mainstream entity, which was arguably Jarvis' main intention.
  • Queen's American popularity took a nosedive thanks to their 1982 album Hot Space. Their previous album The Game in 1980 had been heavily informed by disco just as that genre was falling out of favor, yet it was their biggest hit to date, selling over four million copies in the United States. As a result, Queen decided to build on that album's disco and dance-pop stylings with Hot Space, whose release came well into the early '80s backlash against disco in the US. Needless to say, the reaction was not pleasant; while "Under Pressure", their duet with David Bowie, was very well-received, the rest of the album is widely seen as the band's nadir, a reaction that was especially pronounced Stateside. Overseas, Queen quickly recovered from that misstep and remained successful, but they were dead in America as a result of Hot Space. It went From Bad to Worse with the video for their 1984 single "I Want to Break Free", which featured the band in drag as a parody of Coronation Street, and which was banned on MTV for that reason (since Americans don't know what Coronation Street is, all they saw was the cross-dressing). While Queen did have a couple more songs that would be considered minor hits (including "Body Language" off of Hot Space, which reached #11 in the US), they were never huge in the US again during Freddie Mercury's lifetime. Only after Mercury's death in 1991, followed by the use of "Bohemian Rhapsody" in Wayne's World the following year, did Queen's American popularity start to recover.
  • In 1997, R.E.M. lost their drummer Bill Berry due to health problems (specifically the lingering effects of a near-fatal aneurism he suffered on stage in 1995) and burnout, and going into recording Up, the band found itself adrift and nearly broke up. Upon its release in 1998, Up underperformed in sales, and while it's been Vindicated by History, it was the beginning of the end of their days of mainstream success.
  • Run–D.M.C. were Hip-Hop legends in The '80s, but they struggled to keep up with a rapidly changing music landscape in The '90s. Their 1990 album Back from Hell, influenced by both Public Enemy and the New Jack Swing movement, was an embarrassment, and while their 1993 follow-up Down with the King was welcomed as a return to form, problems at their label meant that it took them eight years to record another album. During that time, Nu Metal arose, heavily influenced by the band's Rap Rock stylings, and so the band drew influence from it in turn for their comeback album Crown Royal, which finally came out in 2001 after three years of delays, a Troubled Production that saw many fights over the album's direction, and Darryl "D.M.C." McDaniel stepping back from recording thanks to both a throat condition and his belief that the whole album was a cynical cash grab. Despite a star-studded list of guest artists and production from the legendary producer Clive Davis when he was in the middle of a hot streak, critics and fans alike generally agreed with D.M.C.'s assessment and steered clear of Crown Royal, dismissing it as a desperate attempt to stay relevant that was missing a third of the band. Run–D.M.C. never recorded another record, and after Jam Master Jay was murdered in 2002 they survived chiefly as a touring act.
  • Saliva's poorly-received 2008 album Cinco Diablo only peaked at #104, and the band has struggled even in the hard rock niche market ever since.
  • Seals and Crofts had been a successful soft rock duo following their 1972 breakthrough Summer Breeze and their 1973 follow-up Diamond Girl, until their 1974 album Unborn Child stalled their momentum. The duo, both devout members of the Baháʼí Faith and strongly opposed to abortion, were outraged by the Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion nationwide in the US, and so they recorded a Concept Album about an unborn child facing an abortion in response. Warner (Bros.) Records warned them that the album would kill their careers, as they were treading into a hot-button issue where a lot of their fans sharply disagreed with them, but they responded that moral principles were more important than money and fame. Sure enough, the album bombed, with its subject matter considered preachy, its Title Track proving enormously controversial to the point that some stations refused to play it, and abortion rights advocates (including the National Organization for Women, who "awarded" them their Keep Her in Her Place Award alongside Paul Anka for his song "(You're) Having My Baby") boycotting them. They only had two more hit singles afterwards, their subsequent albums (barring their Greatest Hits Album in 1975) never charted higher than Gold, and they broke up in 1980.
  • Sepultura was one of the biggest names in metal during the early-mid '90s. Things begun to get unstuck with Roots, which was strongly influenced by the then-nascent Nu Metal genre. The album was a commercial success but proved to be far more divisive among fans. After the departure of Max Cavalera and his replacement by Derrick Green, the band continued to pursue a nu metal sound, driving away more fans and suffering declining album sales. Things would begin to look up with Dante XXI, and now they have managed to regain some respect in the metal community.
  • Shadows Fall was poised to become one of the biggest names in heavy music in the 2000s alongside other rising stars like Lamb of God, Avenged Sevenfold, Mastodon, Trivium, and their fellow hometown heroes Killswitch Engage. 2004's The War Within managed to chart at #20 on the Billboard 200 while signed to an indie label, and their mix of metallic hardcore, thrash metal, and hard rock had endeared them to a wide variety of fans. Like all of the aforementioned bands, they were snatched up by a major label. Unlike the aforementioned bands, their major label debut, 2007's Threads of Life, was a bomb, debuting at #46 (compared to #27 for Ashes of the Wake, #30 for City of Evil, and #34 for Blood Mountain; Ascendancy barely charted but wound up selling far more over the long run) and providing two singles ("Redemption" and "Another Hero Lost") that went nowhere, as the former was too heavy for the average rock radio listener and the latter sounded nothing like the rest of the album. Furthermore, it did nothing to increase their live draw and also helped alienate a lot of longtime listeners with its decidedly more commercial sound. While it didn't destroy their career immediately, it did kick off the start of a lengthy downward slide that took them from being able to pull 800-1,000 people a night in the mid-2000s to pulling 70 a night if they were very lucky by the time of their farewell tour in 2014, turning them into has-been jokes in terms of reputation.
  • Back in 1995, The Smashing Pumpkins was one of the biggest bands in Alternative Rock, with its first two albums having been hugely successful. For the third album, the band insisted on going bigger. What emerged in 1995 was Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, a double album meant to follow in the footsteps of Pink Floyd's The Wall or The Beatles' White Album. While it was a critical and financial success, the work required to create and mix two compact discs' worth of material caused tensions within the band. The tour exacerbated these tensions, especially after Jonathan Melvoin and Jimmy Chamberlain overdosed on heroin, leading to Melvoin dying and Chamberlain, who survived, getting fired. Soon after, Billy Corgan's personal issues, including his divorce and his mother's death, caused him to become a control freak. note  While the band released three more albums, none of them got the same acclaim as their previous efforts, and the original band dissolved in 2000 (they did eventually reunite in 2007).
    • Adore may have truly marked a turning point in the bands' popularity and lineup. Besides the incidents of Jonathan Melvoin od'ing and Jimmy Chamberlin being kicked out of the band during the MCIS tour, people hated the "electronica" elements they built much of the album around. And then there's the music videos during the Adore era being bizarre neo-goth fests. While the videos from The Mellon Collie era (and previous ones) showed the Pumpkins mostly as just real people or did whimsical things like the "Tonight, Tonight" video, in the Adore era all of a sudden, Billy Corgan's dressed up like Pinhead.
  • While the 1996 album Down on the Upside performed well with critics and fans and sold over a million copies, the growing tensions between the band and the music business would bring down Soundgarden. Criticism over the band's departure from the grunge musical style that made them popular, combined with frontman Chris Cornell wanting to retire the heavy guitar riffing that became a trademark of the band, caused a seemingly irreparable rift that kept them apart. Cornell sank into alcoholism following the breakup and attempted a comeback with several Rage Against the Machine members with a supergroup called Audioslave, which, despite three successful albums, also broke up due to Creative Differences. However, in 2010, Cornell and his former Soundgarden colleagues finally made up their differences and reunited the band, releasing King Animal in 2012 to critical acclaim and good sales. Tragically, King Animal turned out to be the band's only post-reunion effort, as Cornell died by suicide five years after its release, and the band ultimately broke up for good after his death.
  • The Spin Doctors' 1994 sophomore album Turn It Upside Down. The belated success of their debut album Pocket Full of Kryptonite brought the jam band revival to mainstream attention, but the stress that this and their heavy touring schedule brought led guitarist Eric Schenkman to quit onstage. In the face of a growing backlash and an identity crisis about their Newbie Boom, the band attempted to assert their artistic credibility on this album, but it instead proved to be formless, unstructured, and just plain weird; the album still went platinum on the strength of their existing fanbase, but that soon dissipated in the face of a lack of hits. Their follow-ups went nowhere, and since then they've primarily been a touring band.
  • The Stone Roses' sophomore album Second Coming had been delayed by Executive Meddling, a productivity-halting lawsuit trying to stop them from moving to Geffen, and general band procrastination (moving to Wales to record did not help). The album was finally released in 1994, over five years after their debut album. The album completely failed to live up to its hype, and despite the lead single "Love Spreads" becoming a genuine hit, the album received middling reviews and disappeared from the charts quickly. Both critics and fans were disappointed by the album's abandonment of the dance-influenced sound that had made the band popular in favor of Led Zeppelin-style heavy blues-rock and guitar wankery (although "Love Spreads" continues to be well-regarded). The band didn't last much longer: they split up two years later, after a series of badly-reviewed live appearances and hiring Replacement Scrappies after their guitarist and drummer left. Frontman Ian Brown later began a modestly-successful solo career, and the band reformed in 2011 with a successful reunion tour.
  • The 1983 album Kilroy Was Here sold well and generated a hit single with "Mr. Roboto", but its recording and promotion would be the end of Styx. Guitarists Tommy Shaw and James "JY" Young were growing increasingly disgruntled with Dennis DeYoung's preference for a poppier sound over the hard-edged prog-tinged material that had made them stars in the late '70s and feared that another Concept Album after Paradise Theatre would pigeonhole the band. As such, they went along with DeYoung's project with a great deal of hesitation. Shaw hated "Mr. Roboto" especially, saying he'd rather quit Styx than sing about robots. The tour for the album, a full-blown musical Rock Opera, not only disappointed fans who came simply for the music, but only further alienated Shaw, who had neither the talent nor the taste for acting and was intensely frustrated by it, finally snapping and smashing his guitar during a show in Landover, Maryland. He quit the band the next day, and Styx spent the next seven years on hiatus. It would be thirty-five years before the band (now led by Shaw and Young) finally gave in to fan requests and played "Mr. Roboto" live again (which DeYoung praised). Todd in the Shadows goes into more detail on the band's breakup in this episode of Trainwreckords.
  • By the time Sugar Ray's In the Pursuit of Leisure came out, their blend of ska, pop, and hip hop had fallen out of touch with modern trends in music, resulting in the record producing zero hits and failing to earn an RIAA certification despite solid reviews. This led to the band taking a 6-year hiatus before their following album, which sold even less.
  • Sugarland had the unfortunate distinctions of their career not being destroyed by music or behavior but bad weather. Their 2010 New Sound Album The Incredible Machine was extremely divisive to both fans and critics, and only one of its singles, "Stuck Like Glue", was a hit. In August 2011, only about a month after the album's last single became their lowest-peaking to date, the duo was subject to a series of lawsuits after a stage collapse during one of their concerts at the Indiana State Fair which killed seven concertgoers. They went on hiatus soon afterward, with both halves of the duo (lead singer Jennifer Nettles and guitarist/mandolinist Kristian Bush) releasing solo efforts in the interim to minimal success. They issued a reunion album Bigger in 2018, but its two singles faltered, sales were abysmal, and the State Fair stage collapse seemed to infiltrate nearly all discussion of the album and its singles.
  • Sum 41's 2007 album Underclass Hero. Their previous record Chuck was a stylistically different yet successful step towards maturity for the band, but they weren't so lucky with this album, which returned to their classic Pop Punk roots but was framed as a Concept Album centered around personal topics. Released around the height of Emo Music's popularity, Underclass Hero received marginal critical reviews, sold extremely poorly, and failed to produce a hit even on Billboard's rock airplay charts.
  • Although The Supremes were able to squeak by with a few more hits after Diana Ross left them to focus on her solo career, their album sales went downhill as a result, finally culminating in The Supremes Produced and Arranged by Jimmy Webb becoming their first record since their breakthrough to not contain any major hits, despite the proven track record of its headlining producer. After this album came out, the group never made a significant splash on the Hot 100 again and they finally broke up in 1977.
  • Like their 1983 album Caught in the Game, Survivor's Too Hot to Sleep flopped hard commercially and produced no top 40 hits. As a result, the band went on hiatus for several years, while lead vocalist Jimi Jamison continued to perform under the Survivor banner without legal permission. By the time Rocky V came out, they were unavailable to contribute a song to the movie's soundtrack, as they famously had for III and IV. They eventually reformed with original frontman Dave Bickler, who had left in 1983 due to vocal problems, but they've never risen above niche status since then.
  • Axiomatic, the 2005 third album by Australian pop-rock group Taxiride, was an attempt at Genre Shift to a more hard rock style. Needless to say, it bombed dramatically compared to their two prior albums (which were both certified platinum). To put it into perspective, Axiomatic peaked at #91, whereas their other albums peaked in the top 5. After releasing an acoustic best-of album Electrophobia that completely flew under the radar, Taxiride fell into obscurity.
  • "Creep" probably would have destroyed TLC in the long run even if Lisa "Left Eye" Lopes hadn't died in a car wreck first. Lopes was disgusted by its Pay Evil unto Evil message (a girl gets revenge on her cheating boyfriend by cheating on him in turn), and she was not shy about letting it be known, even threatening to wear black tape over her mouth in the video.
  • Blue by Third Eye Blind. Riding off the success of their eponymous debut album, Blue had a troubled production. There was tension with drummer Kevin Cadogan and lead singer Stephan Jenkins, as well as the record label, to the point where it requested that the lyrics of one song in particular ("Slow Motion") be removed due to the Columbine shooting earlier that year, and in American markets the song was merely an instrumental. When it was released in 1999, it was met with mixed reviews from critics and peaked at a very lackluster #40 on the Billboard 200. It didn't help that, in contrast to the radio friendly nature of their first album, Blue was darker and more experimental. While it did spawn an iconic pop hit in "Never Let You Go", the other singles ("Anything", "10 Days Late", and "Deep Inside of You") charted poorly and were quickly forgotten. They released a third album, "Out Of The Vein", which sold even worse and it's two singles ("Blinded" and "Crystal Baller") were failures, with the latter not appearing on any chart, causing them to go years without releasing any new material until Red Star in 2008. While they're still around today, they're only remembered as a nostalgia act for their four pop hits, and none of their singles since "Blinded" have charted on any format (except "Everything Is Easy", from the 2015 album Dopamine, and it charted poorly too).
  • Three Dog Night were one of the biggest pop-rock bands of the late '60s and early '70s, with three number one singles and multiple million-selling albums, but their fortunes started to decline with the release of Coming Down Your Way and only worsened with American Pastime, which peaked well below the top 100 of the Billboard 200 and producing no charting singles, resulting in their disbandment. They reunited a few years later, but they remain mostly forgotten to this day, despite their enormous success in the late '60s and early '70s. If Three Dog Night are remembered at all in the 21st century, it's because one of the most notorious legends of classic rock excess concerns one of the band's singers, Chuck Negron, and became a mainstay of Internet clickbait in the mid- to late-2000s (long story short: at the height of the band's fame, Negron purportedly had sex with so many women that his penis exploded).
  • A Tribe Called Quest broke up a month after releasing their 1998 album The Love Movement, not only because it polarized fans but also because members Phife Dawg and Q-Tip were unable to get along with each other. Phife's health issues led to the group reuniting to pay for his medical expenses, and they were in talks to produce a new album to complete their contract with Jive Records, but nothing came to fruition. They continued to tour together through 2013, with their last performance as a group as supporting acts to Kanye West's "Yeezus" tour, and they reformed again in 2015 to record the critically acclaimed We Got It from Here... Thank You 4 Your Service. This became the last album to feature Phife, as he passed away in March 2016, eight months before its release.
  • Twisted Sister was among the hottest acts in rock in 1985. "We're Not Gonna Take It" and "I Wanna Rock", both from the 1984 album Stay Hungry, were catchy, instantly memorable songs that did well on MTV and/or the Billboard charts, while singer Dee Snider earned praise for his rational, intelligent arguments in the notorious PMRC Senate hearings, which proved to be a Pyrrhic Victory for Tipper Gore and her Moral Guardian organization. That year, however, they released the follow-up Come Out and Play, which sold much less than Stay Hungry and didn't have any standout hits. The video for "Be Chrool to Your Scuel" was banned by MTV for alleged offensive content, and the one for their cover of "Leader of the Pack" by The Shangri-Las was panned.

    While Come Out and Play was a letdown, 1987's Love is for Suckers polished the band's sound, took away most of their sense of humor, and wiped their makeup off Kiss-style. Twisted Sister split up the following year; after three one-off reunions in 1997, 2001, and 2002, the band reunited full-time in 2003 and officially disbanded with a 2016 farewell tour after the death of drummer A. J. Pero.
  • While never big in America, Ultravox was a hugely popular and influential Synth-Pop band in their native UK throughout the early 1980s. However, the commercial failure and disappointing critical reception of U-Vox ultimately led them to break up two years later. Though they reformed in 1992, they would not return to their classic lineup until 2008, by which point they were long past their period of chart relevance and were already considered nothing more than a relic of the '80s despite their prior influence (to the point where the only mentions they get in regards to their music nowadays is the Title Track to Vienna acting as a stock 80s hit song in popular media).
  • The use of Violent Femmes' "Blister in the Sun" in a commercial for Wendy's drove a deep rift into the band. Not only did fans accuse them of selling out, but bassist Brian Ritchie felt the same way and sued frontman Gordon Gano, claiming joint ownership of the rights to the song. The group disbanded, and wouldn't reunite until 2013.
  • Van Halen's 1998 album Van Halen III.
    • It marked the debut of Gary Cherone of Extreme as the band's third frontman after David Lee Roth and Sammy Hagar. It was also the last major album he'd be featured on, as well as the last album of new material the band would release until 2012, as its sharply negative reception would cause Cherone to leave Van Halen and the band to go on hiatus. The same factors that drove both Roth and Hagar to quit Van Halen on bad terms were responsible for the failure of Van Halen III — namely, that, despite Cherone ostensibly being the frontman, Eddie Van Halen was the one who was really in charge, even though he had depended on Roth and Hagar to help compose the music in the past.
    • It was also the last album that composer Mike Post would produce, after which he would return to his day job composing theme music for TV shows.

    Female artists (solo) 
  • Paula Abdul took time off to deal with her bulimia after her Under My Spell Tour in 1992, but when she tried to return around 1995 the whole music scene had changed. The beginning of the end was when she performed at the 1991 MTV Video Music Awards and was badly ridiculed for looking rotund in her skimpy costume. Around the same time, she was accused of using special thinning cameras for "The Promise of a New Day" music video. So when she performed at the VMAs, people saw for themselves that she had gained weight, which added to the shock. In the days before the Internet/social media, you either took a person's word for it or waited for an official confirmation. Also not helping her career was her third solo album, Head over Heels, which barely made a dent in the charts and only yielded one moderate hit; the mid-'90s were already a difficult time for former dance-pop superstars, but that record proved she was completely unable to reconcile her manufactured reputation, even with its leadoff single leaning into her Jewish heritage by featuring Israeli pop legend Ofra Haza. The second and more standard single, "Crazy Cool", didn't even reach the top 40, and after the third and last single failed to chart whatsoever, she stopped recording new albums altogether. She never did sing live and when injuries and excruciating pain stopped her from being able to dance, she turned to painkillers and American Idol.
  • Natasha Bedingfield's Strip Me album. Despite international success at the beginning of her career, following in the footsteps of her already successful older brother Daniel, her popularity became almost exclusively concentrated in North America by the time "Pocketful of Sunshine" came out in 2008. As a result, advertising for this album focused primarily on the US and Canada, but the album and its singles flopped badly on the charts, and things didn't improve for her when she finally released "Pocketful of Sunshine" in Europe, three years after its American success. Her planned fourth album, The Next Chapter, finally came out in 2019, seven years after its original announcement, to little success.
  • Michelle Branch's future looked bright after a pair of hit albums, The Spirit Room in 2001 and Hotel Paper in 2003. Unfortunately, her career was a victim of turbulence at Warner Bros. Records, with a revolving door of five label presidents each attempting their own Executive Meddling on her third album, pushing her to sound like (at various times) Avril Lavigne, Taylor Swift, and Katy Perry. It wouldn't be until 2017, fourteen years after Hotel Paper, that she finally released her third solo studio album Hopeless Romantic after getting out of her contract at Warner Bros., by which point she had long since fallen out of the spotlight.
  • Anita Bryant had been a very popular singer in the 1960s and early '70s. She was known for four top 40 hit songs, her Super Bowl V performance, her muzak covers of then-contemporary hits, and being the ambassador of the Florida Citrus Commission (which promoted the sale of oranges). However, her career went entirely sour in 1977 when, after her former friend Ruth Shack helped Dade County, Florida (which includes Miami) pass a landmark bill banning discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, Bryant set up the Save Our Children group to oppose such laws in a campaign that ran heavily on All Gays Are Pedophiles rhetoric. While her campaign was successful and Dade County repealed the ordinance, almost immediately Bryant received fierce backlash from the public and numerous counter-protests, ranging from popular singers like Elton John boycotting performances in Florida to boycotts of Florida oranges, with gay bars creating the "Anita Bryant Cocktail" with apple juice in response. Bryant lost her FCC contract, and her music career died soon. Eventually, the fundamentalist community also turned against her after a divorce from another popular anti-LGBT crusader, which got her branded a hypocrite. Her musical career is mostly forgotten, overshadowed by her activism, and she has remained largely under the radar since.
  • Despite strong reviews, Colbie Caillat's All of You was her first album that failed to produce a hit or reach any certification; her subsequent albums have fared even worse, and she was ultimately dropped by Republic Records in 2015.
  • Irene Cara's 1983 album What a Feelin', contained the #1, Oscar winning hit ("Flashdance...What A Feeling"), plus a top 10 hit ("Breakdance"), a top 20 hit ("Why Me"), and another single that made the top 40 ("The Dream"). Cara had already had massive commercial success for soundtrack songs "Fame" and "Out Here On My Own". Unfortunately, her career petered out after she sued her record label for $10 million in unpaid royalties. The legal battle left her broke and although she did get $1.5 million out of a 1993 settlement from the lawsuit, it probably cost her more in opportunities. She said publicly that she was blacklisted by the music industry due to the lawsuit. Her third and ultimately final studio album, Carasmatic, was shelved by Elektra Records. When it was finally released in 1987, it was a critical and commercial failure (and it arrived years after her peak time, so it already faced an uphill battle). As for Cara, she continued to perform until her 2022 death.
  • Neneh Cherry's debut album Raw Like Sushi was a major critical and commercial hit that quickly established her as one of the most unique faces in pop music and a potent contender to Madonna and Janet Jackson for the title of Queen of Pop. Unfortunately, by the time she released her sophomore album Homebrew in 1992, most of the world had lost interest in her, despite the album itself earning positive reviews. It produced one minor hit with "Buddy X" (a diss track directed against Lenny Kravitz) but failed to chart on the Billboard 200. Although she continued to find plenty of success overseas through the mid-'90s, she never found her way back into the limelight in the US.
  • By the time Sheryl Crow's Wildflower came out in 2005, the adult alternative movement was already in its elder years, but its mediocre reception and lack of smash hit singles signaled the end of her tenure as one of the genre's leading faces.
  • Taylor Dayne was flying high with a string of Top 10 pop hits between 1987-1990, including her #1 single "Love Will Lead You Back". By the time that her third album was being made, she wanted to write more songs and she got the chance. But that third album, Soul Dancing, was not as good as her previous two. Dayne was always more a singles artist than an album artist, and that album didn't generate a hit like the first two did. She released an OK cover of Barry White's "Can't Get Enough Of Your Love" but the video was kind of low budget and the song didn't reach the top 10. Arista Records basically stopped promoting her, particularly when she sang "Original Sin" from the film The Shadow.
  • Country Music singer Holly Dunn's career was abruptly halted by her 1991 single "Maybe I Mean Yes". Although the song was merely about a flirtatious woman playing the By "No", I Mean "Yes" trope, some listeners felt that the lyrics, especially the line "When I say 'no' I mean 'maybe', or maybe I mean 'yes'", were a condonement of Date Rape. Dunn solicited radio stations to stop playing the song, had its music video pulled off the air, and stopped performing it in concert, but the damage had already been done. None of her other songs made any impact anywhere, and she was quietly dropped from Warner (Bros.) Records one album later. She continued to record on small independent labels until 2003, then became a painter and radio DJ before dying of ovarian cancer in 2016. Most news articles at the time of her death placed prominence on the controversy surrounding "Maybe I Mean Yes", even above the actual hits she had in her career.
  • Willa Ford has alluded to the theory that the tragic events of September 11, 2001, was the primary cause in her music career stalling. In May of that year, Ford released the single "I Wanna Be Bad", which peaked at 22 on the Billboard 200. Ford's next single from her album Willa Was Here, "Did Ya' Understand That" failed to garner much attention when it was released on September 11. While 9/11 did signify a huge shift in pop music and caused the music industry to be at a standstill and shut down, Ford nonetheless still broke through at a time when the market was already flooded with blonde starlets (namely, Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Jessica Simpson, and Mandy Moore). What didn't help Ford was that she was being marketed as the edgy alternative to the teen pop star at a time when her peers were already developing a mature image. Ford was marketed towards young men who may have watched her music videos but didn’t exactly buy the albums/singles. Another possible reason why Willa Ford's career didn't take off is because a lot of girls hated her. She had dated Nick Carter and they had a messy breakup. Before social media, she was getting all kinds of hate online on her website from his crazed fans.
  • Released several years after the blockbuster success of her previous English record Loose and not featuring a hot producer of the period like Timbaland, Nelly Furtado's The Spirit Indestructible got marginal reception and barely made any mainstream impact.
  • A particularly disheartening example would be that of pop singer Alison Gold, who followed up her Guilty Pleasure "Chinese Food" with the 2014 single "Shush Up". Not unlike "Rock Me Tonite", the song itself wasn't the killer, but rather, the video for it. The video was shot when Gold was 11 years old, and it features an 11-year-old being pregnant, committing robbery with murder implied and thus given death sentence via electric chair, tortured, dying by suicide, and dancing in skimpy (lack of) clothing and doing extremely inappropriate dance moves — not to mention that titling the song "Shush Up" seems to imply that the term "Shut Up" is more offensive than sexualized depiction of minors! The video's dislikes went through the roof and it received a record number of complaints about its barrage of offensive content, such that it was swiftly pulled and Gold hasn't done anything noteworthy since then. It also seems to have left a black mark on the Ark Music Factory's reputation too, especially when founder Patrice Wilson awkwardly defended the video as "art". With the lone exceptions of Rebecca Black (who has managed an active online and musical presence) and Patrice Wilson (who released a bizarre music video in 2015), none of its acts have done anything noteworthy ever since.
  • When Lauryn Hill's 1998 solo debut album The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill won critical acclaim, massive sales, and the Grammy Award for Album of the Year, she quickly emerged as the Breakup Breakout of The Fugees and looked to have a long career ahead... only for her studio follow-up to fall into Development Hell amid reports of mental health problems. The last straw for fans was her 2002 Live Album MTV Unplugged No. 2.0, a rambling on-stage mental breakdown put to CD that was derided as preachy, unenergetic, and intrusive on Columbia Records' part, with the label themselves admitting that Hill's clout was the only reason why it saw release. Hill vanished from mainstream attention shortly after, and nowadays is better known for her turbulent personal life.
  • A localized example came for the Cantopop singer Denise Ho, whose music was blacklisted in mainland China due to her participation in Hong Kong's Umbrella Movement protests in 2014, which got her arrested.
  • In 2002, Jewel's career took an unexpected turn with "Serve the Ego", which brought the folk rocker a surprise #1 hit on the dance charts. Seeking to capitalize, in 2003 she recorded and released the dance-pop album 0304. Old fans branded her a Sell-Out, and the project failed to bring her any new ones. An attempted Parody Retcon claiming that she was satirizing early 2000s idol singers did little to stem the damage, especially given that she had licensed the lead-off single "Intuition" to promote a line of razors by that name. While she quickly retreated back into her comfort zone (her later forays into Country Music feeling far less removed from her usual style), her career never returned to its '90s heights.
  • In 2012, Kesha was a polarizing yet highly successful pop star coming off her second album Warrior. It was around this time, however, that her continued sexual abuse at the hands of her Record Producer Dr. Luke grew too much for her to bear, leading to a Creator Breakdown as she checked into rehab for bulimia and engaged in a long legal battle to get out of her contract. Together, these problems prevented her from releasing any new material for five years, sapping her career momentum just as it looked like she had a number of interesting projects in the works. Fortunately, after getting out of her contract with Dr. Luke (who wound up disgraced by the whole affair; only to experience a chart resurgence in the 2020s), she enjoyed a Career Resurrection in 2017 with the New Sound Album Rainbow.
  • Long before she became an Academy Award winner and MCU superhero, Brie Larson launched a bid at Teen Pop superstardom in the vein of Hilary Duff, Michelle Branch, and Avril Lavigne. In 2005, Larson released her debut album Finally Out of P.E. Despite collaborating with a heavy-hitting roster of songwriters like Pam Sheyne (Christina Aguilera's "Genie in a Bottle," Dream's "He Loves U Not") and Lindy Robbins (Demi Lovato's "Skyscraper," Fifth Harmony's "Miss Movin' On"), a surprisingly addictive lead single in "She Said", and going on tour with Jesse Mc Cartney for Teen People's Rock in Shop Tour, Larson's album only sold 3,500 copies. To put things into proper perspective, 2005's No. 1 album was Mariah Carey's The Emancipation of Mimi, which sold 404,000 in its first week and, at that point, had the highest first-week album sales in Carey's career. Although Larson promised fans in 2008 on her Myspace that she would be releasing a new EP, it never materialized. In effect, her music career was shuttered largely because the record label, Casablanca Records, had moved on. And after becoming disenchanted with the music industry, she moved on to acting full-time. Larson's only foray into pop music since was in 2010's Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, where she sung a cover of Metric's "Black Sheep".
  • Leona Lewis' debut was so huge that she became one of the only British pop singers to achieve legitimate success across the Pond during the 2000s, but her two followups (Glassheart and Echo) both saw sharp declines in sales, even in her native UK.
  • Despite earning more positive reviews than her debut, Cher Lloyd's sophomore effort Sorry I'm Late was an enormous flop on both sides of the Atlantic, in part due to disagreements between Lloyd and her management that resulted in the album being delayed by half a year and receiving limited promotion. Her profile was already declining in her native UK by the time she crossed over to North America in 2012, but her newfound maturity on this record wasn't enough to counter her initial reputation as a bubblegummy teen pop ditz. Subsequently, she was dropped by Epic Records and went on hiatus for a few years. She has since signed a new deal with Universal Music Group and plans on releasing a new album in the near future, but the only songs she put out since joining Universal went nowhere on the charts.
  • Lisa Loeb's mainstream success ended with the commercial failure of her 2002 album Cake and Pie, which got her dropped from A&M Records. Notably, the album received such poor promotion from the label that Loeb eventually bought the rights to the masters of the songs and re-released the album later that year as Hello Lisa, with an altered track listing and some new songs.
  • In the early '00s, Jennifer Lopez endured a double-header of bad career moves that put her success on the skids.
    • First, in 2002, she released the single "Jenny from the Block" at the height of the tabloid storm surrounding her romance with Ben Affleck. The song and its accompanying video (which co-starred Affleck) attempted to reinforce her street cred as a working-class Puerto Rican girl made good, but they backfired, instead painting a picture of Lopez as an out-of-touch celebrity who had forgotten her roots and sold out. "Jenny from the Block" became the defining image of Lopez, often in mockery. Although the song itself was a hit, reaching #3 on the US Billboard Hot 100, her next few albums were sales disappointments, and she largely faded from the limelight until her Career Resurrection in the early 2010s.
    • "Jenny from the Block", however, was just a speedbump compared to the fallout from the infamous Gigli released a year later — a film starring Lopez and Affleck that featured their romance at center stage. Widely derided by virtually everybody who saw it as one of the worst films ever made, "winning" six out of nine nominated Razzies (a subsequent seventh award was bestowed to the film a couple of years later) and grossing barely above $7 million out of its $75 million budget, Gigli was the double-tap that finished Lopez's A-list stardom for good. (Co-star Affleck and director Martin Brest were no better for wear in the film's aftermath either, with Affleck's relationship with Lopez falling apart and his career floundering before he took up directing films, and Brest retiring from filmmaking altogether.) She only had a few minor hits with romantic comedies and TV work before an acclaimed turn in 2019's Hustlers.
  • Madonna's 2003 album American Life temporarily marked the end of her reign as the Queen of Pop in her native United States. Branded as a gritty protest album, the record divided fans and critics for its failed forays into Hip-Hop and folktronica, its anvilicious image, and the fact that Madonna focused mostly on comparatively shallow personal problems. The Title Track became her lowest-charting lead single up to that point (exacerbated by its controversial anti-war music video being swapped out for an unassuming alternative following the US invasion of Iraq), while the album's following singles became her first to not chart. Thankfully, Madonna soon enjoyed a Career Resurrection with the smash success of Confessions on a Dance Floor, with lead single "Hung Up" topping the charts in 41 countries.
  • British electropop singer Natalia Kills, after enjoying some success in Europe and Australia in the early '10s, saw her career come to a screeching halt in 2015 when she and her husband Willy Moon's gigs as judges on the New Zealand version of The X Factor went horribly awry. On the first live show of the season, Natalia snapped at a contestant simply because she thought that he had copied his style from her husband, with Willy joining in with her. The outrage against the two was immediate and scathing, with Natalia and Willy being booted from the show and replaced the very next day. Natalia had to drop her stage name and start using her legal name Teddy Sinclair in order to keep working in the music industry at all, and while she still works as a songwriter and with the band Cruel Youth, her career as a pop star in her own right ended with that incident.
  • After British-born Australian singer Olivia Newton-John reigned as one of the biggest pop divas in the world in the late '70s and early '80s, following her Grease-fueled comeback, the sales for her 1985 album Soul Kiss were disappointing, largely due to the younger and more provocative Madonna overtaking her throne as the biggest female star in pop. It only produced one top 20 hit and merely went Gold, while its follow-up had no major hits and wasn't certified.
  • In the summer of 1998, Jennifer Paige's debut single, "Crush" peaked at #3 on the Billboard Hot 100 charts. In addition, "Crush" was certified Gold by the RIAA. "Crush" proved to be the first and only single of hers to break through the Hot 100. In fairness, 1999's "Always You" did make it to #6 on the Hot Club Dance Play charts in the United States. While it's merely speculative, one possible factor for Paige's career stalling was simply because of poor timing. Paige's brand of mainstream pop tended toward the chaste. But it still, fit in nicely in the post-Lilith Fair/pre-Total Request Live time period for women in music. However, "Crush" came out just before the Teen Pop wave really exploded so to speak with Britney Spears and "Baby One More Time". So naturally, Paige had to compete with a glut of other, much younger breakouts of the era like Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera, who also specialized in vacuous, glossy teen pop mixed with '80s Synth-Pop. Secondly, Paige did not release her follow-up album, Positively Somewhere until a good three years after her self-titled debut album. It had the additional misfortune of being released less than a week after the September 11th terrorist attacks. More to the point, the singles from that album didn’t even get released until March 2002, seven months later. Shortly thereafter, Paige parted ways with Hollywood Records and she would ultimately release her third album, Best Kept Secret independently over seven years later. By 2015, Paige had to use Kickstarter to fund a new album, 2017's Starflower.
  • Singer-songwriter Liz Phair was an indie darling in The '90s but did not enjoy much commercial success, which she sought to rectify in 2003 with a Self-Titled Album that marked a Genre Shift from indie alt-rock to mainstream teen pop-rock. The album met a scathing reception from certain critics who saw it as a Sell-Out, and Phair's career went into freefall shortly after. Her 2010 album Funstyle in particular led to her label dropping her and was widely panned as unhinged and directionless after being self-released. Though the self-titled album was eventually Vindicated by History and Phair spent the late 2010s slowly rebuilding her indie cred, she wouldn't release another album after Funstyle until 2021, and even then it didn't recover her 90s momentum.
  • After spending the early '70s as an international icon of glam rock and one of the most successful women in rock and roll, Suzi Quatro finally broke her native America during the late '70s, propelled by a brief stint on Happy Days. Having already adopted a generally softer and more eclectic style by her comeback, she began to flirt with Synth-Pop on Main Attraction, her only record with Polydor and the one with the most personal input to that point. The result was panned by audiences and led to a nearly decade-long hiatus before she put out another studio album, by which point she was long forgotten. Meanwhile, women like Joan Jett and Pat Benatar assumed her role as the MTV era really took off.
  • While Ashlee Simpson's career was killed by her SNL performance, her sister Jessica Simpson found her musical career killed by a Genre Shift. In 2008, Jessica decided to release a Country Music album, Do You Know. Although the lead single "Come On Over" was somewhat well-received, and she had scored a touring gig with Rascal Flatts, the album promptly fell flat on its face. Critics panned the material as boring and lifeless, saying that she felt like a dollar-store knockoff of Carrie Underwood (not helping matters was that nearly half the album was written by frequent Underwood collaborator Hillary Lindsey). Follow-up singles went absolutely nowhere, with the third completely failing to chart at all, and sales petered out at 200,000 copies. She was booed offstage at a concert in Wisconsin, and ultimately lost her record deal with Epic Records. Jessica's only musical output since then was an independently released Christmas album in 2010, which came and went without a trace. Since then, she has largely focused on business ventures and television work.
  • Released six years after her previous album, Jordin Sparks' attempted comeback record Right Here Right Now performed absolutely dismally commercially, despite decent critical reviews, and produced no charting singles.
  • Former S Club 7 member Rachel Stevens had a moderately successful solo career upon her original group’s disbandment, reaching #2 twice on the UK Singles Chart. Unfortunately, this would turn out to be rather short-lived. Critics fell in love with her 2005 sophomore record, Come and Get It, thanks to its progressive electronic sound, but it fared poorly with general audiences, despite the positive hype and Stevens being one of the biggest English sex symbols at the time. The album’s failure can be attributed to her general abstinence from a celebrity lifestyle and therefore lack of a provocative public persona in a time when provocative pop princesses were in vogue, not helped by the fact that she had almost no writing credits on the record. Although her Polydor contract promised three more albums, she never returned to the studio after her label prematurely stopped promoting Come and Get It, and after a failed attempt at a Hollywood breakthrough, she instead opted to focus on modeling, Reality Television, and raising a family. However, the record is still a minor cult hit, having featured on The Guardian's “1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die” and retaining enough of a fanbase that Stevens DJ’d at a celebration of its 10th anniversary.
  • Pop singer-songwriter Tiffany's third album, New Inside, flopped so hard that it and its singles failed to chart, a sharp decline considering her previous album went Platinum and contained two top 40 singles, one of which peaked at #6. As was also the case for fellow late '80s teen pop queen Debbie Gibson's Anything Is Possible (itself a career-killer), this album was actually a reasonable success in Japan, where it peaked at #17.
  • Kim Wilde was one of the most popular and versatile solo female musicians of the 1980s in her native Britain, Germany, and Switzerland. Despite starting off as a new wave singer, she successfully transitioned into dance-pop as her career went along, remaining moderately popular during the house movement of the early ‘90s, as well. Then came 1995’s Now and Forever, a foray into contemporary R&B that got thrashed by critics due to its formulaic, bubblegummy lyrics and lack of creative direction. The record was also a commercial bomb, failing to chart in the UK and scoring only a couple of super minor hits on the British and German pop charts. Due largely to its failure, Wilde took a decade-long hiatus before finally returning with a new record. Fortunately, she’s been a highly successful touring artist whose albums still chart well in Europe since her comeback. She also forged a successful career as a gardener and television presenter of gardening shows during her hiatus from music.
  • Gretchen Wilson came out of nowhere in 2004 with "Redneck Woman", the lead single to her quintuple-platinum 2004 smash Here for the Party. The album was heralded for her unpolished, hardcore style, and seen as a welcome change as the last wave of female country artists had died out so hard that no solo female had a #1 country hit in all of 2003. Her success also dovetailed into that of the MuzikMafia, a Nashville-based singer-songwriter aggregation spearheaded by Big & Rich, who had almost equal success with their own debut album Horse of a Different Color. Wilson was a member of said Mafia, and several members contributed to her album (most prominently Big & Rich member John Rich, who co-wrote and produced most of it). Although she had some detractors, most critics and fans saw Gretchen as a new voice of women in country music, balancing old-school honky-tonk with a fresh level of aggression and grit. But it all came tumbling down fast in 2005 with "All Jacked Up". Despite debuting at #21 on the country charts, the highest debut ever made by a female artist at the time, the song came to a dead halt at #8 less than two months later before reversing course. Gretchen's follow-ups went almost nowhere, and she quietly left Columbia Records in 2008. The sudden flameout seemed to kill the momentum of nearly everyone in the MuzikMafia except Big & Rich as well, lending an air of overexposure to the whole proceedings.
  • Kiely Williams tried to pursue a solo career after The Cheetah Girls broke up, but it was killed by her first single in 2010, "Spectacular". It received negative reviews and became highly controversial thanks to its questionable lyrics that celebrate binge drinking and unprotected sex with strangers, and possibly rape — the protagonist was so drunk that her consent was questionable at best, and a few lines suggest that the guy intentionally got her that drunk, and possibly drugged her. Williams tried to defend the song by saying it was actually a protest against the behaviors it portrayed, but it didn't help. Since then she hasn't released anything (ignoring the 2018 leak of her unreleased single "Make Me a Drink", which was expected to be her solo debut).

    Male artists (solo) 
  • 50 Cent's 2007 album Curtis, particularly the media storm he built around it, ruined his career and image virtually overnight. His 2003 debut album Get Rich Or Die Tryin' is widely considered to be a classic of early '00s Hip-Hop, and is one of the best-selling rap albums of all time, but his 2005 sophomore album The Massacre received a very polarized reaction from both critics and fans. With people questioning his staying power, Fifty, in an attempt to build hype around Curtis, boastfully announced to the public that if Kanye West's album Graduation sold more copies than Curtis during their first week of release (both albums were deliberately released on the same day), he would officially retire from rapping. This drew the ire of many fans, who began to perceive him as an arrogant prick. The fact that Fifty went back on his word when Graduation did indeed sell far more copies than Curtis was the finishing blow. Curtis' failure was also credited by multiple critics as the Genre-Killer as well, since Gangsta Rap took a visible nosedive from mainstream prominence, taking a few big careers along with it. His fourth album, 2009's Before I Self Destruct, was both a critical and commercial failure, and the album Animal Ambition was stuck in Development Hell before quietly being released in 2014. In 2015, he filed for bankruptcy. Fifty waited out his unfashionable period as a TV producer, director and screenwriter, receiving critical acclaim for his work. By the 2020s, Fifty made a small comeback as a nostalgia act, touring his old hits, collaborating with artists he influenced like Ed Sheeran and A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie, and turning up as a surprise guest at the 2022 Super Bowl halftime show (due to Eminem's intervention). Hindsight made this possible — in 2007, West had seemed like the Alternative Hip Hop darling sweeping away Fifty's sickeningly commercial Glam Rap style, but with hip-hop moving back towards danceable Gangsta Rap via Trap Music, and West's once-in-a-generation Creator Breakdown turning him into an outspokenly antisemitic Presidential candidate, Fifty began to look like the voice of sanity by comparison.
  • Despite only finishing as runner-up in The X Factor UK 2005, Andy Abraham initially had a very promising career, and his first two albums enjoyed strong sales. Unfortunately, his future was destroyed virtually overnight by his disastrous failure and last-place finish in the 2008 Eurovision Song Contest. Aside from the single release of his Eurovision song (which flopped so badly it didn't even get into the charts), Abraham hasn't released a single album since.
  • The hit song "Sexy Bitch", while launching David Guetta's career, killed that of guest-artist Akon, who hasn't had a hit since. The Auto-Tune craze slowly dying down, plus the heavy scrutiny he received for simulating sex acts on a 15-year-old girl onstage, certainly didn't help for him.
  • Biz Markie's music career was derailed severely by a lawsuit filed by singer-songwriter Gilbert O'Sullivan over a track on his 1991 album I Need a Haircut, which heavily sampled Sullivan's 1972 hit, "Alone Again (Naturally)" without Sullivan's permission. The track was permanently banned, Warner Bros. Records was permanently banned from selling the album (which would eventually be re-released by another company without the offending track), and Markie was referred to the criminal courts. Though he narrowly avoided criminal charges of copyright infringement due to the attorney general declining to press charges, the damage had been done, and his next album in 1993, All Samples Cleared!, would sell extremely poorly as a result. Markie would only release one more album of original material before diabetes did him in in 2021.
  • Back on My B.S. by Busta Rhymes. In addition to being his worst-received album to date, it was his first not to receive any certification, signaling the end of his heyday.
  • Country Music singer Chris Cagle had been a fairly consistent hit-maker for the first decade of the 21st century with multiple radio hits such as "Laredo", "I Breathe In, I Breathe Out", "Chicks Dig It", and "What a Beautiful Day". In late 2007, he looked to be shaping up for one of the biggest hits of his career with "What Kinda Gone", a Sleeper Hit that slowly found its way to #3 on the country charts. But right as that song peaked, Cagle was arrested and jailed for domestic assault of his girlfriend. Follow-up singles bombed completely, and Capitol dropped him. While he released another album on Bigger Picture Music Group in 2012, its singles were largely unsuccessful and the label closed not long after. Cagle ultimately retired in 2015.
  • Despite some big hit singles in the mid-2000s, St. Louis rapper Chingy was constantly subject to Nickelback-levels of scorn from people who considered him a Nelly wannabe with poor rapping skills. After two commercially successful but unfavorably received records, he finally struck out with his third effort Hood Star, which produced one top 10 single with "Pullin' Me Back" but sold marginally and fared no better critically than his previous two records. Since then, Chingy has been pretty much entirely insignificant.
  • Gavin DeGraw had a brief comeback in 2012 with the Platinum-certified hit "Not Over You", but the leadoff single to Make Your Move, "Best I Ever Had", failed to crack the top 40, putting an end to his relevance except for some modest success in the adult pop market.
  • Jason Donovan's singing career went downhill after he successfully sued a magazine for spreading rumors about his sexuality in spring 1992, thus causing most of his fans to turn their backs on him and people to hate him for accusations of "homophobia", even though he didn't mean it and he was right that the rumors were not true. Nowadays, while he still had a decent amount of fans, since he hasn't alienated all of his fanbase, he hasn't had any top ten hits since the incident and he ended up falling into obscurity. However, outside music, he's managed to have a pretty solid career in musical theatre, radio, and various television projects.
  • Peter Frampton's follow-up to his highly popular live album Frampton Comes Alive! was I'm In You, a low-key experimental funk album. Despite the title track managing to become his biggest hit (#2 on the US pop charts), the album confounded his teenybopper fans, and the combination of the album's failure and his role in the film Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (which also killed producer Robert Stigwood's RSO label) the next year completely obliterated his career. To add insult to injury, Frank Zappa spoofed the album with "I Have Been In You", a cut from his own album Sheik Yerbouti.
  • While the '90s did not bring him any significant hits, Gary Glitter was still a respected and bankable performer and one of the symbols of the '70s Glam Rock scene. In 1997, however, he was convicted for possession of child pornography on his computer. In the aftermath, he was banned from all performances and his cameo in Spice World was cut. With this, and various organizations (including the NFL) banning the use of his songs during events, he was forced to produce and release his final studio album On (2001) independently as no record company or distributor wanted their name attached to him, dooming it to sell only 5,000 copies. Whatever slim chances he had of winning back the crowd were lost when he was convicted in Vietnam for performing sexual acts on minors in 2006, and again in 2015 (in his native UK) for several child molestation cases from the late '70s.
  • Billy Idol's career never recovered from the 1993 bomb of Cyberpunk, a Concept Album inspired by the cyberpunk literary movement and the new computer technology of the time. His new image and sound, far from futuristic and rebellious, were ironically seen as woefully out-of-date and pretentious at the height of the grunge era, while actual cyberpunk enthusiasts saw him as a shallow poser. Between that and a near-fatal drug overdose shortly after, Idol went on hiatus for eleven years starting in 1994 in order to concentrate on his family.
  • Michael Jackson's fall from grace wasn't really due to a bad album per se, but due to his various personal controversies. Still, Invincible was Jackson's first real album in six years and outside of "You Rock My World", is incredibly forgettable. Prior to that, there was HIStory: Past, Present, and Future -- Book I, which in hindsight felt like a huge ego trip; endless advertising, sailing giant statues of himself around the world, hyping this up as era-defining. And for what? Half a greatest hits album and a couple of new singles and filler. And that's before getting into stuff like the controversy over the lyrics to "They Don't Care About Us" and his deteriorating relationship with his label. These were all the ingredients were there for a massive letdown that might have cause people to go "oh, really?" at him as an artist for the first time. How much of that was tied into him trying to overcompensate for the scandals is another matter. But there was a possibility of this becoming messy anyway.
  • Throughout 1984 and 1985, Nik Kershaw was one of Britain's most consistent hitmakers, with seven top 20 singles in a row, of which "Wouldn't It Be Good", "I Won't Let the Sun Go Down On Me", and "The Riddle" reached the top 5 and also achieved success internationally. Things started to slow down, however, with the failure of "When a Heart Beats" near the end of 1985, and once he finally released his third solo album, Radio Musicola, nearly a year later, he seemed to have completely lost his magic touch. Despite "Nobody Knows" becoming a major hit in Japan, none of the new record's singles even made the top 40 in his native UK. Kershaw himself blames the album's poor performance on previous overexposure, but even after attempting multiple comebacks years later, nothing ever seemed to get his career back on track. Fortunately, though, he found renewed success as a behind-the-scenes songwriter in the '90s, most notably for the mid-'90s Boy Band Let Loose, as well as Chesney Hawkes' UK #1 single "The One and Only" (which also yielded success on the Hot 100 that had eluded Kershaw during his prime as a singer).
  • Even with the decently-charting single "Eenie Meenie" (which was fueled by Justin Bieber), Sean Kingston's Back 2 Life album did poorly commercially and Kingston's career has never recovered in any way since.
  • Tracy Lawrence was a constant chart presence on country radio for most of The '90s. He hit #1 on the country music charts with his 1991 debut single "Sticks and Stones", boosted by the publicity that he received when he survived getting shot four times after protecting a female friend from an attempted robbery and rape at a Nashville hotel. His next nineteen singles all peaked within that chart's Top 10 while his first four albums all sold either platinum or double-platinum. Even a 1994 incident where he was charged with reckless endangerment after allegedly shooting at some teenagers on the freeway didn't seem to have a negative impact on his career, partially because he was cleared of the charges. But his momentum stopped abruptly in fall 1997 when he was accused of abusing his then-wife, former Dallas Cowboys cheerleader Stacie Drew, after a concert in Las Vegas. His then-current single "The Coast Is Clear" was immediately dropped by radio, and a Nevada judge convicted him and ordered him to pay $500 to a women's shelter. Atlantic Records allegedly put a temporary recording ban on him, although Lawrence himself later denied this. While he had momentary returns to the Top 10 with "Lessons Learned" in 2000 and "Paint Me a Birmingham" in 2004, both were quickly stunted by label closures. His last radio hit was 2008's "Find Out Who Your Friends Are", an independent release that only took off due to a remix featuring Tim McGraw and Kenny Chesney. Combined with his increasing age and his twangy traditionalist style falling out of favor at the Turn of the Millennium, he was unlikely to last much longer anyway, but his 1997 misdeeds almost certainly hastened the end of his ongoing relationship with radio. Despite this, he has continued to tour and record independently.
  • Jerry Lee Lewis was, in 1958, one of Rock & Roll's biggest stars, with hits like "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On" and "Great Balls of Fire", and a wildman persona that left fans breathless. Then, while on tour in England, word got out to the press that Lewis' new wife Myra was thirteen years old. And his cousin.note  English fans booed him mercilessly and forced the early cancellation of his U.K. tour. Upon returning home to America, Lewis discovered that even his youthful fan base back home didn't want anything more to do with him. He was blacklisted in the music industry and soon reduced to playing small gigs. Seemingly washed-up in his early 20s, it took several years before Lewis regained the respect of fans and the industry, having switched to country music in 1968 and topped the country charts with the song "Another Place, Another Time".
  • Rock singer Marilyn Manson attributes his downfall to the Columbine massacre, for which he was widely Mis-blamed by Moral Guardians who felt that his music had influenced Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold to become killersnote . While he's kept working to this day and still has a good core of fans, his A-list mainstream momentum was snapped by the shooting, and his subsequent albums, 2000's Holy Wood (In the Shadow of the Valley of Death) and 2003's The Golden Age of Grotesque were both sales disappointments (in the US, at least; they were among his biggest hits in Europe, where the Columbine controversy never reached), signaling an Audience-Alienating Era that would last until the release of The Pale Emperor in 2015. But Manson's resurgence wouldn't last long, as multiple women (including ex-girlfriend Evan Rachel Wood, Esmé Bianco, and Phoebe Bridgers) came forward in 2021 accusing him of sexual misconduct and abuse, putting his career on ice permanently.
  • Ricky Martin's Self-Titled Album in 1999 was not only his big smash crossover in America, it was the big bang for the "Latin Invasion" of American pop music in the late '90s and '00s. And yet, somehow it was all the other singers from that boom (Enrique Iglesias, Marc Anthony, Jennifer Lopez, Shakira, etc.) who benefited much more in the long run than Ricky, who pretty much flamed out just as quickly as he roared into the U.S. music scene. For why, one can easily blame his 2000 follow-up Sound Loaded. For one, the songs on Sound Loaded were very mediocre compared to the album cuts from the previous album, and furthermore, while he was still closeted, even at the time it was widely speculated that Martin was gay, and there was some evidence to it beyond just the fact that he was a Pretty Boy pop idol. This being a time when homophobia was more widespread in the US than it is today, Martin's appeal was thus unfortunately narrowed, from both guys who didn't want to be Mistaken for Gay and from girls who couldn't buy him as a Latin heartthrob.
  • MC Hammer was a Hip-Hop superstar in the early '90s, but the Gangsta Rap boom caused his goofy, PG-rated persona to go out of style, which led him to adopt a Darker and Edgier image on his 1994 album The Funky Headhunter. It alienated his existing fanbase, who saw it as a betrayal of the parents and kids who made him famous, and was mostly laughed at by actual gangsta rappers, who saw it as a desperate attempt to stay relevant. After the failure of The Funky Headhunter, Hammer's Conspicuous Consumption caught up with him, causing him to file for bankruptcy in 1996.
  • Willy Moon, the husband of Natalia Kills (described under Female Artists), harpooned his own career just as badly after the X Factor debacle. His stumble wasn't as steep given that he wasn't as big a name and didn't have as far to fall, but it still effectively buried his shot at success.
  • While Ne-Yo's Non-Fiction was fairly polarizing, it at least sold reasonably well and had a modest urban and top 40 hit with “She Knows”. However, the follow-up, Good Man, received even more middling reviews and failed to send either of its singles to the Hot 100, and it only reached a measly #33 on the Billboard 200 and didn’t even reach the top 10 on the urban albums chart, cementing the fact that his days as a pop/R&B superstar are over.
  • Soul singer Billy Paul's career took a massive blow after his debut single "Me and Mrs. Jones" was followed up by "Am I Black Enough For You?". Nearly everybody on the label, including Paul himself, thought that "Black Enough" was a terrible choice for a single, and that its Black nationalist themes and message would alienate mainstream white listeners and paint a picture of Paul as an angry Black radical, but Kenneth Gamble and Leon Huff, the heads of Paul's label Philadelphia International Records and also the writers of the song, loved it and released it as his second single anyway. Sure enough, while "Black Enough" became a minor cult hit among Black nationalists, at the time Paul's concerns were vindicated: pop stations saw the single as militant and blacklisted Paul, who became remembered as a One-Hit Wonder afterward.
  • Imperial Blaze derailed Sean Paul's career. While he still has modest success as a guest performer (including a different #1 hit on both sides of the Atlantic in 2016), this album's poor sales and reception (combined with the death of the dancehall craze) effectively killed his momentum.
  • In The '50s, Elvis Presley was the poster child for youth rebellion. He had to put his career on hold in 1958 when he got called up for the draft, but upon completing his Army service in 1960, he seemed poised for a comeback. Unfortunately, his manager, "Colonel" Tom Parker, pushed him into a film career that saw him starring in a string of musical comedies, and while he was still successful as a movie star and live performer, his music career dried up outside of soundtrack hits. John Lennon put it quite plainly when he said following Elvis's death that "he died when he went in the Army" and that the rest of his career was "a living death". He did eventually enjoy a comeback as a musician in 1968 courtesy of his live TV special that year, albeit with a Genre Shift to country and adult contemporary.
  • Charlie Rich, a Country Music singer best known for his crossover hits "Behind Closed Doors" and "The Most Beautiful Girl", got his moment in 1975. At the Country Music Association awards, he was presenting the award for Entertainer of the Year, and opened up the envelope to find that the name inside it was John Denver. In response, Rich pulled a lighter out of his pocket and set the card on fire. Some thought that this was a reaction to Rich not perceiving Denver as a country artist, but he later admitted that he was under the influence of alcohol and painkillers. Despite this, the damage was done: the CMA blacklisted Rich, and his career went into a downward spiral. He would only have one more major hit in 1977's "Rollin' with the Flow" (which, unlike his earlier songs, did not cross over) before getting dropped from Epic Records. Rich spent the rest of the 1970s on various smaller labels, quietly retiring in 1980 and releasing only one more album before his fatal pulmonary embolism in 1995.
  • Shaggy's fourth album Midnite Lover was a huge flop and almost ended his career, but he made a triumphant comeback a few years later with Hot Shot, which contained two chart-topping singles. Lucky Day, however, received disappointing reviews and failed to produce any major hits, despite its lead single "Hey Sexy Lady" appearing in Kangaroo Jack, and Shaggy was immediately replaced by Sean Paul as the big pop-reggae singer/rapper of the day. He managed to score a minor hit in 2015, but he has still never come anywhere close to matching the success of "Boombastic", "Angel", or "It Wasn't Me" since this record's failure.
  • During The '90s, Will Smith was as famous for his Hip-Hop career as he was for his acting career, but his hits started falling off in the early '00s before ending with his 2005 album Lost and Found. Will had been famously clean-cut as a rapper, so him trying to go Darker and Edgier and Hotter and Sexier in an attempt to keep up with changing trends in hip-hop came off as corny, unconvincing, insecure, and Wangsty in ways that did not flatter his style one bit. Afterwards, he switched to acting full-time and never looked back.
  • Soulja Boy was lucky to avoid becoming a one-hit wonder when "Kiss Me Thru the Phone" emerged a major hit in 2009, but after the rise of Young Money ushered in a new era of pop rap, the hype for Soulja Boy finally died down by the time he released The DeAndre Way a year later.
  • Ironically, despite "Rock Me Tonite" being Billy Squier's biggest hit single, the video killed his career. Kenny Ortega stepped in to direct it two weeks before it was due for a World Premiere Video on MTV; Billy was too much of a nice guy to junk an already troubled video in that time frame. Within days of people seeing the footage of him arising from satin sheets and prancing around in a pink tank top, they drew the only obvious conclusion, and he stopped selling out shows. He fired his manager and didn't release another album for two years.
  • After the breakup of The Beatles, all of its members pursued solo careers, and of them, Ringo Starr was initially the most successful, his down-to-Earth everyman persona contrasting with his larger-than-life bandmates. As The '70s wore on, however, his success hit diminishing returns while Paul McCartney and (before his assassination) John Lennon emerged as the Beatles' Breakup Breakouts, the public seeing him as the Butt-Monkey of the Fab Four who lacked his bandmates' talent, was coasting on his past and his musician friends, and was less interested in music than he was in partying and living a Millionaire Playboy lifestyle. As such, for his fourth solo album, 1977's Ringo the 4th, he leaned into disco and chose to rely less on his famous friends for support, instead writing most of the songs himself. It turned out to be a spectacularly bad fit for him, and the album bombed, with none of its singles charting in the US. His career only recovered in the late '80s after he got clean and formed the live touring band Ringo Starr & His All-Starr Band.
  • Cat Stevens narrowly escaped this with 1975's Numbers, but Executive Meddling pushed him on to complete two more albums, 1977's Izitso and 1979's Back to Earth. The latter was a true Creator Killer for him, as it failed to make the Top 30 and left Stevens, by this time formally known as Yusuf Islam, absent from the pop world for nearly thirty years.
  • Keith Sweat's career went south once he tried for a Darker and Edgier image. While this worked okay on Still in the Game, it didn't pan out on Didn't See Me Coming, which failed to produce a major hit and marked the end of his time as a major force in contemporary R&B.
  • T.I.'s No Mercy received lukewarm reception and failed to match the monster sales of its predecessor Paper Trail, and he has yet to come anywhere close to his late-2000s success (aside from his feature on "Blurred Lines").
  • Ike Turner was a respected blues/funk musician for decades, but all that stopped in the early '90s when ex-wife Tina Turner's autobiography I, Tina, adapted into the biofilm What's Love Got to Do with It (1993), utterly destroyed his reputation by revealing him to be a domestic abuser. The fact that he defended himself with statements like "yeah, I hit her, but I didn't hit her more than the average guy beats his wife" didn't help matters. Even in death, he is known as Tina's abusive ex-husband first and a musician second.
  • (West) German liedermacher Hannes Wader invoked this. When he became too popular with the German bourgeoisie, he recorded Hannes Wader singt Arbeiterliedernote , a live album of radically leftist music that earned him the status of a Persona Non Grata for multiple decades. He won back the crowd when he broke with the German communist party.
  • Former Pink Floyd bassist/vocalist/songwriter Roger Waters derailed his solo career with the failure of The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking and Radio K.A.O.S combined with his feud with the rest of Pink Floyd. While his third solo album, Amused to Death was hailed as on par with classic Floyd albums, his career never truly recovered until his 1999-2000 "In The Flesh" tour and a one-off reunion with Pink Floyd at Live 8 in 2005. Waters subsequently staged successful live revivals of The Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall.
  • '70s rocker Edgar Winter's penchant for musical experimentation made him a "musician's musician" beloved by his peers but whose mainstream success faded in The '80s. In 1986, after joining the Church of Scientology, he embarked on a comeback attempt with Mission Earth, based on L. Ron Hubbard's massive Doorstopper science fiction saga, after Hubbard's publisher personally contacted him about doing so and left him with detailed posthumous notes from Hubbard himself (Hubbard Died During Production) serving as instructions. Needless to say, given the controversies surrounding Hubbard and Scientology, the album tanked and Winter's comeback was stillborn.

    Producers/composers 
  • At the premiere of Lily in 1977, the audience turned out in droves within just 20 minutes. Leon Kirchner never wrote another opera thereafter, although his musical career continued.
  • After the Super Bowl XXXVIII halftime show, where Janet Jackson's breast was accidentally exposed on national television in the middle of a highly sexualized performance, MTV was effectively blacklisted from ever putting on another Super Bowl halftime show, and the NFL turned to classic rock for the next six halftime shows before switching back to mainstream pop with The Black Eyed Peas in 2011. Janet's career also suffered; while it wasn't quite a Creator Killer for her, she did undergo an Audience-Alienating Era and a career downturn that lasted into the 2010s, only ending with the 2015 album Unbreakable and her 2019 induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Justin Timberlake, however, came out virtually unscathed from the incident.
  • The abject commercial failure and negative critical reception of the JaneDear girls' self-titled album in 2011 seems to have put an end to John Rich's side job as a producer and songwriter. Since then, he has focused entirely on his primary role as one-half of Big & Rich. (It also put an end to the JaneDear girls; group member Danelle Leverett assumed the name Nelly Joy and later joined Colbie Caillat's country music side project Gone West, which also broke up after only one single.)
  • It wasn't so much a failure as it was long, but William Tell prevented Gioachino Rossini from composing a fortieth opera altogether.
    • Constantino Dall'Argine composed Barber of Seville that failed miserably at its premiere in Bologna in 1868 — two days before Rossini's death — and destroyed his career as a composer.
  • Japanese rock musician Mamoru Samuragochi's composing career was suddenly halted in February 2014 when it was revealed that not only were most of his compositions actually ghostwritten by Takashi Niigaki, but he wasn't deaf. This was enough to have his Hiroshima Citizen's Award rescinded and Nippon Columbia to drop him from their roster. Samuragochi has remained relatively quiet since the controversy.
  • Although nowadays it's seen as one of his best ever productions, the relative American failure of the Ike & Tina Turner single "River Deep – Mountain High" brought producer Phil Spector's career to a standstill and was a major factor in driving him into seclusion for the rest of his life, along with his divisive production of The Beatles' Let It Be. Ironically, it was actually a huge success in Europe, not that this brought him much comfort.
  • Timbaland's career took a nosedive with Shock Value II. While that album spawned a few decently charting songs, they were nowhere near as big compared to some of the massive hits off of Shock Value, and II was otherwise a commercial disappointment. Not only has he yet to release another album, but he never returned to the superstar heights from his heyday.

    Record labels 
  • Artery Recordings' history of screwing over artists came to bite them in the behind when they got bought out by Warner in 2017. Given what Artery alumni Attila (Metalcore) and Chelsea Grin had to say about the label, it was only a matter of time before this happened to them.
  • Country Music record label Category 5 Records was off to a solid start in 2006 after releasing two albums by former '90s stars: Travis Tritt's The Storm and Sammy Kershaw's Honky Tonk Boots. However, in December 2007, Tritt attempted to sue the label for breach of contract, claiming that label head Raymond Termini had fired most of the staff prior to the album's second single, had exaggerated claims about the staff's competence, and had made disparaging remarks to other labels to prevent them from signing him. At the time, Termini also owned a number of assisted-living facilities in Connecticut which came under scrutiny due to claims of both poor patient care and misallocation of Medicaid funds (in other words, he was using government money to fund the label instead). Termini was later jailed for wire fraud, his assisted-living facilities went bankrupt, and Category 5 Records was shuttered in 2008. Altogether, the label only released one other album, a half-tribute, half-original content George Jones album called God's Country. Jerrod Niemann and Donovan Chapman also had singles on the charts at the time of the label's closure, although Chapman's was seamlessly picked up by another label. Niemann later had moderate success on Arista Nashville until his own Creator Killer moment, while Kershaw self-released all subsequent albums and Jones largely released best-of compilations before his death in 2013. Also in 2013, both Niemann and Tritt reacquired the rights to their respective Category 5 catalogs; Niemann issued his as the album Yellow Brick Road while Tritt reissued The Storm with bonus tracks and called it The Calm After... Craig Hand later charted one single as lead singer of the short-lived band Bush Hawg, while Odiss Kohn and Shauna Feagan disappeared from the music scene entirely.
  • The pioneering New Wave Music label Factory Records was taken down by two major factors in the early '90s:
    • The first was Yes Please!, the disastrous 1992 album by Happy Mondays. The album went several times over-budget and the band members spent more time doing crack (which, ironically, was the result of them relocating to Barbados to kick their heroin addiction; there was no heroin on the island, but plenty of crack) than recording any material (the first demos sent to the label didn't even have vocals because the band forgot to write any lyrics). The failure of the album also took down Happy Mondays, who wouldn't record another album until 2007.
    • The second was New Order's delay in following up Technique. When the band finally released Republic the year after Factory went under, it was a major hit for their new label London Records and would have been the album that saved Factory from its sad demise.
  • MCA formed the sub-label Infinity Records in 1978 in the hopes of the Los Angeles-based label expanding its operations to the East Coast. It only produced one hit, the Rupert Holmes album Partners in Crime which contained the mega-hit "Escape (The Piña Colada Song)". The label also had some modest success with albums by the jazz fusion band Spyro Gyra, but most of their other releases flopped or failed to turn a profit. Desperate to stay alive, Infinity spent millions of dollars to the Roman Catholic Church in order to secure the rights to a number of Pope John Paul II's recordings, which were compiled in the album Pope John Paul II Sings at the Festival of Sacrosong for an October 1979 release in the hopes that his international popularity would save the label. They instead lost even more money on it, as the album in question was widely panned and sold far below what Infinity hoped for. After its failure, MCA got smart and shuttered Infinity, sending its operations and masters back to the main MCA label and dropping all of its artists from their roster with the exceptions of Holmes and Spyro Gyra.
  • When Volumes revealed that their label, Mediaskare Records, didn't pay them royalties for their first two albums (Via and No Sleep), it tarnished whatever credibility the label had left. While the label was already well-known in industry circles for their terrible deals and poor treatment of the acts on their roster and had been quietly declining for a while as most of the bands on it either broke up or went on indefinite hiatus (most of them being in such dire financial straits due to Mediaskare that they weren't even trying to find new labels), this likely served as the final blow to an already-ailing label. They had been called out before (particularly by As Blood Runs Black, another former flagship act), but the difference was that Volumes had enough of a present following to make it hurt, while the bands that the label would have signed were instead going to Stay Sick and Unique Leader, and they no longer had a ready supply of desperate young bands who would accept their atrocious contracts. Mediaskare's social media has been inactive since 2018 and their website is no longer up, implying that the label quietly closed their doors.
  • Master P and his record label No Limit's popularity declined due to a lawsuit and split from production company Beats By the Pound. These events forced the bulk of their catalog to cease production, forcing them to attempt to restart their empire from scratch.
  • In 1999, low-budget VHS and CD leader Simitar Entertainment released Slammin' Wrestling Hits, a knock-off compilation of poor covers of WWE wrestlers' themes, an obvious attempt at cashing in on that company's WWF: The Music series. Since those songs were copyrighted and Simitar naturally didn't get any sort of permission to use them, WWF's parent company Titan Sports and music licensee Cherry River Co. sued them, and won. The resulting debts from that lawsuit drove Simitar to bankruptcy, and they ultimately crumbled over in 2000.
  • Jive Records came to prominence in the 1980s and 1990s for their success with hip hop and R&B acts like DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince, Schoolly D, Too $hort, and R. Kelly. They struck gold with the Teen Pop boom of the late 1990s and early 2000s with Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears, and *NSYNC. However, Jive would increasingly develop a reputation for their mishandling of their Black acts. Artists who experienced Executive Meddling from Jive include Outkast, Clipse, Ciara, A Tribe Called Quest (rule #4,080 is allegedly in reference to Jive), Nivea, Syleena Johnson, Kelis, and Papoose, among others. Jive folded in 2011 and their remaining artists were moved to RCA Records.
  • Interscope Records's Suretone imprint was killed off by the one-two punch of Chris Cornell's Screamnote  and Shwayze's Let It Beatnote , both of which failed commercially and critically. Suretone's implosion had unintended consequences for the label's biggest act The Cure, who found themselves without a recording contract after the dust settled. Angels & Airwaves, another successful Suretone band, also got lost in the shuffle but were able to find their footing as an independent act. The Suretone brand was revived in 2017 with distribution through Warner's ADA division, with a new lineup of acts including Collective Soul.
  • TVT Records was once a major indie, with notable artists such as Nine Inch Nails, Lil' Jon and Pitbull. In 2002, the label defaulted on a loan from Prudential, which bought the rights to Nine Inch Nails, The Connells and Television's Greatest Hits from TVT. In 2007, the label lost a $9 million lawsuit to Slip-N-Slide Records, after a court ruled that Slip-N-Slide held the distribution rights to an unreleased 2001 album by Pitbull. Although TVT founder Steve Gottlieb stated this was not the end of his label, TVT went bankrupt, and sold its label to The Orchard and its songwriters to Reservoir Music. In 2010, Prudential sold the rights to its artists to The Bicycle Music Company.

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