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Executive Meddling / Music

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The executives don't want to hear about it until you make your music dance to their tune.


  • Kmart and Walmart refused to sell In Utero until new packaging that listed the track "Rape Me" as "Waif Me" was created. The cover art, which features anatomical drawings of a naked woman, was also changed. The only reason Kurt Cobain agreed to the changes was because when he was a kid, his family was poor and he was only able to buy music from Kmart or Walmart since there wasn't a record store in his hometown, and he empathised with kids in the same situation.
  • Averted on Nevermind. Executives wanted to censor the cover famously featuring a naked baby, but the only form of censorship Cobain would agree to was a sticker covering the penis that read "If you’re offended by this, you must be a closet pedophile". The executives backed down.
  • "You Know You're Right" was this for a long while back in the day. Dave and Krist garnered in a lawsuit with Courtney Love due to their interest in releasing the song in a box set but Love argued the song would be wasted in a box set. The song was eventually released in a greatest hits compilation simply entitled Nirvana as an agreement between Love and Dave/Krist, although a box set of the band was released a few years later under the name With the Lights Out.
  • Eels were forced by their record label into licensing "Mr E's Beautiful Blues" for Road Trip, as well as doing a video for it that alternated between clips from the movie and scenes of vocalist E driving a van with most of the main cast as passengers. In his autobiography Things the Grandchlidren Should Know, E stated that while he'd already licensed songs for movies in the past, he was none too happy to have his music associated with "a frat boy movie" - for him the only enjoyable part of making the video was a brief scene where he pretended to beat up the cast members. They also forced him to include the track on the album Daisies of the Galaxy. E felt like the song didn't fit the tone of the album, so he got his revenge by including it only as a hidden bonus track at the end.
  • Electric Six ended up reluctantly covering Queen's "Radio Ga Ga" on Señor Smoke because the record company wanted them to use it as a single. Perhaps not coincidentally, while they've put out full Cover Albums, they've rarely included Cover Versions on their otherwise original albums.
  • Devo 2.0 was essentially a pre-teen Devo cover band marketed by Disney with a fair deal of input from Devo themselves, who mostly went along with the idea because it they thought it was just the right kind of ridiculous. A lot of the original songs had substantially rewritten lyrics due to executive meddling. Some were pretty reasonable things like excising a repeated reference to a gun in "Big Mess" or changing "Girl U Want" into "Boy U Want" and making it about an innocent crush rather than lust. Other changes were a little weirder — in one interview Jerry Casale said "That's Good" lost the completely inoffensive couplet "Life's a bee without the buzz / it's going good 'til you get stung" because someone was convinced they were trying to get a drug reference past the censors. Apparently, one of the higher ups interpreted those lyrics as "hip-hop slang" meaning something like "Life is a bitch when you're not high, so make sure that you don't get caught with drugs by the police".
  • The Beatles are one of the most notorious and sustained examples of this trope. It's said that the infamous "butcher" cover they did for Yesterday... and Today was because they (particularly John Lennon) objected to the way Capitol Records (their U.S. label) "butchered" their albums. (This Urban Legend has been debunked as it was part of a photo shoot for the cover of "Paperback Writer".) Capitol's treatment of the Magical Mystery Tour double-EP (expanding it into an album) was so successful that it has replaced the double-EP version, even in the British market. The "butchering" did affect the Beatles very much, making them sign a contract with Capitol which said that all albums (excluding special cases, like Magical Mystery Tour and Hey Jude) should be exactly the same as the UK versions.
    • Famously, George Martin refused to let Ringo Starr — who had just replaced Pete Best as the band's drummer — play in the recording of the band's first single "Love Me Do"; having disapproved of Best's drumming, he wasn't willing to trust Starr blindly and they recorded the album with session drummer Andy White, Starr reduced to shaking a tambourine. Martin later relented and let Starr record a version with the band. The version with Starr was released as a single, and the version with White appears on the band's first album, Please Please Me.
    • EMI originally felt that "Revolution" was too distorted, and that buyers wouldn't enjoy hearing such a noisy mix. The Beatles objected, and half-won the battle - the mono mix is distorted, while the stereo mix is cleaner.
    • In a case of averted meddling, George Martin wanted their first single to be a song called "How Do You Do It?". The boys fought it all the way, insistent that they only wanted to do music they'd written themselves (with the exception of covers). When Martin persuaded them to do a run through of "How Do You Do It?", they did it with such little enthusiasm that Martin (to his credit) agreed to "Love Me Do" as the first single instead. He then tried to convince them to use "How Do You Do It?" as their second single, but finally set aside the song for good when he heard their retooled version of "Please Please Me". "How Do You Do It?" did go on to be a number #1 hit for Gerry and the Pacemakers.
  • A case from the 18th century: Mozart's Don Giovanni contains a deeply sad and lyrical soprano aria, which out of the blue ends in 9½ bars of the most spectacular virtuoso coloratura imaginable. It seems like a hastily-tacked on display of virtuosity, and was condemned by critics as early as Berlioz as a crime against art. The reason is probably that the opera director demanded a virtuoso cadenza for his prima donna.
  • Rappers get this a lot. If it's too hardcore and or socio-political there's a good chance the album will be either shelved or retooled. Same goes for the music videos; ironically, videos with Stripperific models are OK.
  • Positive Executive Meddling rescued Simon & Garfunkel's career. After their first, all-acoustic album Wednesday Morning, 3 AM tanked hard upon its 1964 release, the duo split and Paul Simon moved to England. During this hiatus, the song "The Sounds of Silence" (note the plural) became popular among radio stations in Florida, while in general The Byrds had become popular as the pioneers of folk-rock, scoring hits with electric covers of Bob Dylan songs. In June 1965, producer Tom Wilson borrowed Dylan's backing band and had them overdub electric guitar, bass and drums over the original recording. The resulting single, "The Sound of Silence", entered the charts and became the duo's first #1 single. Simon accordingly returned to the US and reunited with Garfunkel to resume their career.
  • Death Metal band Deicide was rushed by Roadrunner Records to release In Torment In Hell. Because of this, the album sounds insanely generic compared to the rest of their work. Some rumors have even floated around that the band made the album that average on purpose so they could finish up their contract with the label.
  • The initial master tapes of The Jimi Hendrix Experience's Are You Experienced album were rejected by Reprise Records because it was thought that the feedback was unplanned distortion. The tapes were sent back to Reprise with a note explaining that the distortion was intentional and should not be corrected.
  • A positive example: When Swedish hair-metal band Europe wrote the song "The Final Countdown", they had no intention of releasing it as a single — they were just looking for a cool concert-opener. One suggestion from Epic Records later, "The Final Countdown" was the band's biggest hit single of their career.
  • Judas Priest were royally fucked by Gull Records, their first label. For the first album they were given a producer who dominated the sessions and cut all of the fan-favourite songs out. After they left the label after two albums, the record company then proceeded to release half a dozen compilations of these two albums to cash in after Priest became famous. They have also messed up the track order for Sad Wings of Destiny, hence the track named "Prelude" appearing in the middle of the album. Things are so bad that Judas Priest even have a section of their discography on their website warning the fans about them.
  • Aerosmith's "Janie's Got a Gun" originally contained the line "He raped an itty bitty baby", but Geffen Records requested that Steven Tyler change it to "He jacked an itty bitty baby." Tyler sings the former lyric in live performances, however.
    • Speaking of Aerosmith, it's been said that their decision to incorporate outside songwriters after Done With Mirrors was at the insistence of the record label. This new method created a Broken Base but it certainly made them a lot more accessible and radio-friendly, and some of their biggest hits came out of it and marked their Career Resurrection.
  • Another case of executive meddling gone right: Tom Petty was persuaded by his producer Jimmy Iovine to re-record "Don't Do Me Like That", a song he had earlier recorded with his former band Mudcrutch, for his album Damn the Torpedoes. It became one of the biggest singles of his career.
    • Petty once fought Executive Meddling to hold the line on album prices. Miffed that MCA was increasing the list price of albums to $9.99, he threatened to rename Hard Promises "The $8.99 Album". MCA kept the album's price at $8.99.
    • Also caught up in MCA's list price increase scheme was Steely Dan's Gaucho, which was released at $9.99 against the band's wishes. That album's other problems, some of which were caused by Executive Meddling, are the story for another trope.
  • Metallica considered naming its debut album Metal Up Your Ass, but the label vetoed. The eventual title, Kill 'em All, comes from Cliff Burton's suggestion on what they should do to record distributors.
  • Liz Phair suffered heavily from this, having run out of money during the recording of her self-titled 2003 album. The execs refused to release her album unless she worked with the pop writing duo The Matrix (no, not that one), which produced her biggest Billboard hit, "Why Can't I?", which sounds almost nothing like the works that made her famous.
  • The so-called Loudness War (which reduces the audio quality of CD recordings) is largely caused by executive meddling, and often done against the will of the artists and mastering engineers.
  • Big Boi of Outkast fame was to release his first solo album Sir Lucius Leftfoot: The Son of Chico Dusty as early as late 2008; however, Jive Records wasn't so sure the album would be able to sell. After having Big Boi rework the album once, and setting a 2009 release date, Jive once again decided they didn't like the album, telling Big Boi that his album was a "piece of art, and we don't know how to market that." Things took a turn for the worst when the executives suggested to Big Boi that he should make his own version of Lil Wayne's "Lollipop" so that they could sell the album. Big Boi packed up his things and left for Def Jam. To make things worse, Jive decided they won't let him carry over any tracks he did with group-member Andre 3000 to put on the album....so he's leaking them.
  • Country Music record label Curb Records has screwed over countless artists through its policy that lead-off singles have to hit top 20 on the country music charts before the album drops. Several artists on the label — even one-time A-listers like Jo Dee Messina — have had albums delayed for years or axed entirely because the singles didn't catch on.
    • One of the biggest victims was Amy Dalley, who had seven singles between 2003 and 2007, but no album. Three of them reached #27, #23 and #29, which nearly any other label would consider reasonable enough of a peak for a lead single from a new artist, but not Curb. She never put out an album and ultimately left the label.
    • Steve Holy had modest success with the first three singles from his 1999 debut album, but the album still sold so poorly that record stores were returning unsold copies to the label. Then in 2001, he had a runaway hit with "Good Morning Beautiful" from the soundtrack to the movie Angel Eyes, so Curb reissued the album with that song tacked on as a bonus track — two weeks into the song's five-week stay at the top. After that, he issued five singles that never appeared on an album due to underperformance (the highest being the #26 "Put Your Best Dress On") before finally putting out a second album in 2006 on the heels of his second #1 hit, "Brand New Girlfriend".
    • They didn't even treat their longtime flagship artist Tim McGraw with respect. He had countless albums stalled since 2007 because his contract was nearing its end, leading to shenanigans such as a whopping seven singles from Let It Go (although to be fair, one of them was "If You're Reading This", which was originally intended as a one-off song performed on an awards show, but after a ton of radio stations picked it up, it was officially sent as a single and added to later pressings of the album); a third Greatest Hits Album only one album after his last one (a move that even McGraw himself publicly decried); and a soundtrack single from Country Strong just to delay the lead-off single from the last album in his contract for a few more months. What's more, fans are almost unanimously displeased with the single releases, which have included total novelties like "Last Dollar (Fly Away)" and "It's a Business Doing Pleasure with You" (not helping was that the latter was co-written by Chad Kroeger of Nickelback), a half-hearted cover of Eddie Rabbitt's "Suspicions", and weightless radio fodder like "Let It Go" and "Southern Voice", when there are plenty of better choices on each album.
    • Turned up to eleven in mid-2011: they sued him for turning in the final tracks for Emotional Traffic (the last album in his contract) too soon because they thought it was a "transparent attempt" to get out of his record deal. He countersued. And won. Once Emotional Traffic came out, he jumped ship for Big Machine Records. But even after he did, Curb wasn't done yet: First, they tried to launch a single titled "Right Back Atcha Babe" at the same time that Big Machine released the single "Truck Yeah" ("Truck" was a Top 10 hit, but "Babe" became his lowest peak since 1993). Then, following the release of his first Big Machine album Two Lanes of Freedom, Curb rush-released yet another mishmash filler album of duets he'd done over the years.
    • LeAnn Rimes got hit with this in 2010 with Lady & Gentlemen, a concept album which had her performing cover versions of songs that were originally from a male perspective. After its lead-off single tanked, Curb tried to salvage it by releasing not one, but two non-cover songs. Both flopped, but she got the album out in 2011, with the non-covers relegated to bonus tracks.
    • Curb was completely unable to market or promote their small cache of alternative country artists, as artists in that genre are concerned less with singles for country radio (which rarely plays them) and more with albums (the one exception being Lyle Lovett, who on his departure from the label in 2013, stressed that the break was an amicable one). This is especially shown with their handling of Hank Williams III. Notably, Curb refused to release not one, not twonote , but three of Hank III's albums due to claims the albums had objectionable or noncommercial content, all later released on other Curb imprints or independent labels. Hillbilly Joker was later released without Hank's permission after he left the label. No wonder he sometimes wears "fuck Curb" T-shirts at concerts.
    • Curb so badly mismanaged The Clark Family Experience (who had a minor hit in 2000 with "Meanwhile Back at the Ranch") that the band ended up owing $800,000 to Curb, blaming mismanagement and bad contracts on the debt. This also delayed their album, originally slated for a Labor Day 2001 release, all the way to August 2002, by which point three other singles had failed to take off. In return, Curb tried to dismiss the bankruptcies as an attempt to leave the label, and tried to file an injunction to keep the band from recording for any other label, but this was later dropped. The band broke up after their album finally got out and never recorded again. However, three of the members later founded a second band called Sons of Sylvia, which won the only season of FOX's The Next Great American Band and appeared on a Carrie Underwood album cut before disappearing again. Group member Ashley Clark attempted a solo single in 2015, but was cut short by his record label closing.
  • A more positive example for Tim McGraw after he moved to the Big Machine label in The New '10s. The first single to his second album, "Lookin' for That Girl", was getting tons of negative reception from fans for its "bro-country" sound and heavy use of Auto-Tune. As a result, they pulled it in favor of "Meanwhile Back at Mama's", which was received much more positively.
  • Lyric Street Records was also guilty of this to a lesser extent, ignoring any act not named Rascal Flatts. They also shed a huge amount of artists in 2003-2004 (including Rushlow, Sonya Isaacs, Kevin Denney, Brian McComas, Deric Ruttan [who fared better in his native Canada], and Sawyer Brown [who went back to their previous label], all of whom were only one or two singles into an album — in all but Rushlow and McComas' cases, the albums didn't even get released). They also had entire acts a few years later whom they subjected to Invisible Advertising, including Lisa Shaffer, Ragsdale, and The Parks (a father-son duo; the father previously had a hit as one half of the duo Archer/Park in 1994). Each got only one single (Lisa's being the only one to chart) and that was it.
  • In 1987, baritone vocalist William Lee Golden was forced out of The Oak Ridge Boys, because the band and the label wanted to pursue a Younger and Hipper image, which they felt was impossible with Golden's long flowing hair and Wizard Beard. Golden was replaced by the younger-looking Steve Sanders (the rhythm guitarist in their road band) for seven years before returning in 1995, and has remained ever since.
  • The Mars Volta sort of dealt with this on Frances The Mute: They weren't expressly forbidden to make the "Cassandra Gemini" suite one thirty minute track, but were told that if they did, they'd only be paid for an EP, since the album would only have five tracks (despite the fact that it was 76 minutes long). Thus, the CD version of the album has the piece separated into 8 tracks, with track breaks that don't even correspond with the five subtitles given on the tracklisting. The version sold by iTunes and other online retailers still has it formatted as one track though, as does the vinyl version of the album.
  • Some long songs on King Crimson's earlier albums have "sub-headings" in their titles; for example, "The Court of the Crimson King including The Return of the Fire Witch and The Dance of the Puppets". According to Robert Fripp:
    "The reason songs and pieces acquired separately titled sections, like 'The Return Of The Fire Witch' and 'The Dance Of The Puppets', was so the group would get paid full publishing royalties on our American record sales."
  • Nellie McKay suffered from executive meddling with her first record label, Columbia Records. She wanted to release Get Away from Me as a double album, but the label insisted on a shorter release. The label's reasoning was that the songs on Get Away from Me could all fit on one CD, while McKay wanted to release the songs as a Distinct Double Album to emulate turning a vinyl record over. After convincing them with a humorous PowerPoint slideshow, she was allowed to release it as she intended, provided she fronted her own money for the production. She has since started her own record label.
  • Avex, Ayumi Hamasaki's record company, tried to force her to release a greatest hits album, which she felt was premature. They also played up the supposed rivalry between Ayu and Utada Hikaru, in the interest of sales, which Ayu denied vehemently. She was none too pleased with the entire situation, as evidenced by her iconic choice of album art for A BEST.
  • Capitol Records meddled in The Beach Boys albums at least twice. The group was told that Pet Sounds needed an obvious hit, leading to the addition of "Sloop John B.", the only cover on the album, and the only track to break from the overall introspective mood. The Boys were later told to add "Good Vibrations" to Smiley Smile, despite the fact that it was already past its prime as a hit by that point, and it bore no relation to the stripped-down style of the album.
  • When the independent label Grass Records got sold, the new owners wanted to focus more on bands that would produce hit singles, so they wanted indie rockers The Wrens, their most popular band at the time, to sign a bigger contract and start recording much more commercial material: When they refused, not only were they dropped, but the two albums they'd made for the label were deleted. The Wrens did eventually find a new label and their first two albums would get reissued - Grass Records, meanwhile, turned into Wind-up Records, and did well for themselves by signing Creed, Seether and Evanescence. A pun-based Take That! showed up in The Wrens' later single "Everyone Chooses Sides": "Green grasses fade from where you wind up".
  • Since about 2009, it has been increasingly common for Country Music record labels to give songs last-minute pushes in airplay to get them to #1 on the easier to manipulate Mediabase singles charts, in part because of the number of syndicated countdown shows that use that chart instead (American Country Countdown used Mediabase from 2009-17, when it reverted to the Billboard Country Airplay chart). As a result, this often fudges chart positions and undercuts chart rankings on Billboard, to the frustration of chart watchers and Wikipedia editors alike. One of the first cases when Capitol Records manipulated the charts just right to get Luke Bryan a Mediabase #1 with "Do I" while also allowing Lady Antebellum to hold five weeks at #1 on Billboard with "Need You Now" (where "Do I" only got to #2).
  • The story behind this t-shirt: When Emilie Autumn was first trying to find a record deal, she had to talk with several record label executives, and every one of them invariably tried to rail her towards a more mainstream image. One of them was apparently so obnoxious and dismissive of anything she could say, Emilie allegedly left the meeting to cool off and she came back after writing "I'm sorry, was I thinking again?" on the t-shirt she was wearing. She eventually recorded her first album under her own label, and among the first pieces of merch she sold was a replica of said tee.
  • Christina Aguilera and her fans are known for thinking this about her Bionic record. This is backed up by Ladytron and Christina's other "indie" collaborator Goldfrapp both said that their tracks were ignored in the album track picking process. Ladytron only got a bonus track. This is unconfirmed, but possible.
  • Sophie B. Hawkins clashed dramatically with her record label while recording her album Timbre over the use of a banjo in the song "Lose Your Way". Sophie and the label parted ways after the album was released (to very little promotion) and ended up re-releasing it with new production closer to what she originally intended.
  • According to Jason Slater of Snake River Conspiracy, Reprise Records demanded that they produce a clean version of their debut album Sonic Jihad. This was a huge problem, as their first single "Vulcan" starts out with singer Tobey Torres dropping an F-bomb and making vulgar references throughout. In response, Slater made a version that censored the profanity as blatantly and jarringly as possible (such as loud bursts of distorted static).
  • Toby Keith:
    • Near the end of his tenure with Mercury Records, he was working on a new album, but label execs didn't like it. They chose only two songs off the would-be album, "Getcha Some" and "If a Man Answers", released both as singles off a Greatest Hits Album, and asked him to try again. When they didn't like the next songs that he sent, either, Toby demanded out of his contract and took said songs to DreamWorks Records. That label launched him with "When Love Fades", but when it bombed, he asked that it be pulled and replaced with a song that Mercury had rejected titled "How Do You Like Me Now?!" That song was a Sleeper Hit, becoming a five-week #1, his first Top 40 pop hit, the biggest country hit of 2000, and the start of a huge Career Resurrection that lasted until DreamWorks Records closed in 2005.
    • With his last several albums having all been on Show Dog-Universal Music (which he is president of), he insisted on withdrawing singles around their 15th week on the charts, regardless of position, just so he can get out one album per year. An average run to #1 on the country charts is closer to 25-30 weeks, and the A-listers can take 3 years between albums — he's shooting himself in the foot again and again. However, he later backed off and started giving his albums more room to breathe, but this was countered by his decision to keep releasing alcohol-themed singles after the runaway success of "Red Solo Cup". As a result, his career ground to a halt in The New '10s: the singles off 35 MPH Town were the lowest-performing of his career, and "A Few More Cowboys", the intended lead to his 19th album, sank without a trace.
  • Britney Spears has been meddled with:
    • Britney was forced to change her video "Everytime" when record label executives found out that she wanted to do a video where she kills herself. So, instead of killing herself, she passes out and drowns due to a bump on the head, only to wake up at the end of the video. Your Mileage May Vary on whether the Britney at the end was reincarnated, though.
    • The album Britney was originally supposed to be titled Shock Your Mind and was supposed to have much edgier, darker songs...she actually had co-written all but one of the tracks for the album. The label was displeased, though, and long-time producer Max Martin was called in to sweeten the sound. Britney was displeased with the meddling, though, and the two clashed in the studio, which ultimately ended in the two not working together for several years.
    • They meddled yet AGAIN by completely shelving the unreleased album The Original Doll. Britney angered her label by going on radio station KIIS-FM and playing a rough draft of the lead single for the album, "Mona Lisa," and as a result the plug was pulled completely on the project. Many believe that the label simply didn't think the album was commercial enough to sell well, which was the true reason for the album being shelved.
  • Century Media tried to promote Anneke Van Giersbergen from The Gathering as a femme fatale during the late 90s, just like many singers of female-fronted gothic metal bands who were portrayed as sex symbols in photo-shoots, promotional material and concerts. This left Anneke uncomfortable. The band then switched sound, abandoning metal in favor of a more atmospheric sound rooted in alternative / progressive rock, and the label totally neglected any form of support, to the point that the band risked to dissolve in 2000. Thankfully, the Dutch decided to form their own record label Psychonaut Records and continue their path, taking creative control over how their music is marketed and distributed. Century Media still capitalized by releasing the In Motion DVD without band permission.
  • Studio executives tried to do this with Rush, after the less than stellar sales of their third album, Caress of Steel. The label wanted shorter songs, with more ready to release singles. The band, sticking to their guns, recorded and released 2112 instead, which went on to become their breakthrough album.
  • Savatage had to face this for the release of their third record Fight for the Rock. The band said that they were driven to make the record by their label, Atlantic Records; particularly singer Jon Oliva began writing pop-rock songs for other artists on the label such as John Waite. However, the label eventually turned around and told the band to record the music that Oliva had written for other artists themselves. This destroyed the band's credibility in the eyes of the press and reviews were not kind to the band. The negative critical reaction has been cited as a cause of Oliva's bout of drug and alcohol depression which eventually drove him from the fore of the band. He later termed this album "Fight for the Nightmare".
  • Florence + the Machine's hit single "Rabbit Heart (Raise It Up)" exists because of this trope. She wrote this song because her company wanted an upbeat poppy track to introduce her onto the radio.
  • The Veronicas may have had to put "Someone Wake Me Up" instead of "Don't Say Goodbye" on their second album due to this trope.
  • Daryl Hall of Hall and Oates recorded his solo album, Sacred Songs, in 1977 which was planned to be released later that same year. When presented to the higher-ups at RCA, the company thought the album's proggy sound would alienate fans of Hall and Oates, and shelved it indefinitely and when Hall tried to rerecord some songs for Robert Fripp's solo album Exposure, the company halted the move. It wasn't until a petition by fans and critics who wanted to hear the album that RCA relented and released it in 1980. Despite being well received, many people, including Fripp, who produced the album, feel that the three year delay severely dampened the impact the album could have had on the music scene at the time.
  • Hot Tuna was originally named Hot Shit, but RCA wouldn't hear of it.
  • Similarly, KISS wanted to call themselves Fuck but no label executive would accept that.
  • Nazareth's song "Hair of the Dog" was originally named "Son of a Bitch", but A&M Records asked the band to change the Intentionally Awkward Title - hence the new punny one, given it sounds like "Heir of the Dog". Strange that the song's lyrics remained untouched.
  • John Mellencamp for much of his career had to deal with the fallout from Executive Meddling about his name: an early manager liked his music but thought his name was difficult, so his first album was released with his name given as "Johnny Cougar". It took him nearly fifteen years to make the change back, from Johnny Cougar to John Cougar to John Cougar Mellencamp, and finally to his own name.
  • In 1994, MCA retooled country trio McBride & the Ride, which originally consisted of Lead Bassist Terry McBride, drummer Billy Thomas, and guitarist Ray Herndon. McBride was relieved of his bassist duties, while the other two members were kicked out and replaced by a different lineup: Randy Frazier (bass), Keith Edwards (drums), Kenny Vaughan (guitar), Gary Morse (steel guitar) and Jeff Roach (keyboards). The band was also renamed Terry McBride & the Ride. Vaughan and Roach were quickly (less than a year) replaced by Bob Britt and Rick Gerken before MCA released the band's only "Terry McBride & the Ride" album. Even worse, McBride and Morse were the only band members who played on it, with studio musicians filling out the ranks! The album went nowhere and the band broke up.
  • In 2012, Clear Channel (now iHeartMedia) signed deals with various country music artists to spam their songs on their stations for a day to force them into really high debuts on Billboard (unlike most other genres, the country music charts are determined only from airplay — at least until October, when the existing airplay chart was split off, and the "main" chart began including non-country airplay and downloads like the Hot 100). The first song to get the Clear Channel treatment was Kenny Chesney and Tim McGraw's duet "Feel Like a Rock Star", which debuted at #13 (the second-highest debut ever in the chart's history). However, the song absolutely bombed at radio, peaking at #11 a mere six weeks later. The tactic has continued largely unabated ever since, to hit-and-miss results — some iHeartMedia deals are for songs that would've ascended the charts more traditionally. It's especially frustrating for chart watchers, as the inflated debuts are usually followed by a massive decline in chart positioning on the following week before the song starts to rebound, although sometimes even that doesn't happen — "21" by Hunter Hayes spent nearly its entire chart run struggling to return to its debut position (and eventual peak) at #21, and Sugarland's "Still the Same" never re-entered the Top 40 after its debut at #26, due in part to the charts stagnating over the holiday season and thus negating any buzz for new single releases). In addition to inflated debuts for established artists, their "On the Verge" program often pumps up debuts for up-and-coming artists, which more often than not leads to the artist having a Follow-Up Failure and becoming a One-Hit Wonder (Cam and Tucker Beathard being two big examples — the latter never even got to issue an album!) while others, such as Luke Combs and Maren Morris, have been able to establish hit-making careers anyway.
  • Delta Goodrem has been extremely unlucky with her recording companies. Her first single was a pop thing she didn't quite pull off ("I Don't Care"), 6 years later she releases a pop-rock-dance Genre Roulette Self-Titled Album which has many people questioning her sincerity on most of the songs and she abandoned her original style of singing for Céline Dion-like singing, which turned off people who liked her first Mistaken Identity/Innocent Eyes way of singing, THEN 5 years later her album which her recording company had been sitting on for maybe year is finally being discussed at being released late 2012. Unlucky artist is unlucky.
  • Chicago, after releasing four consecutive albums of radio-friendly pop music and increasingly deviating away from their signature jazz-rock fusion roots, recorded an album called Stone of Sisyphus in 1992. the album was, in many ways, a return to those classic Chicago roots. As it contained no commercially-accessible radio hits, Warner (Bros.) Records chose not to release it. For nearly two decades, the band released a series of compilation albums instead of writing and recording new material. Finally, in 2008, "Stone of Sisyphus" was released on Rhino.
  • OK, the Yes examples:
    • Anderson Bruford Wakeman Howe's proposed second album (with backing vocals by bassist Chris Squire), recorded in Montserrat in 1990-91, was incorporated with tracks recorded by the Los Angeles-based Yes (whose recordings would feature Jon Anderson's vocals), including unfinished demos by Yes guitarist/keyboardist/vocalist Trevor Rabin, and a Chris Squire/Billy Sherwood collaboration to form an eight-man Yes lineup, so that Arista Records could sell more copies than an ABWH album could. A home-recorded acoustic guitar instrumental by Steve Howe and a Stick bass/electronic drum duet by Tony Levin and Bill Bruford were added to the album. With producer Johnathan Elias computer-editing the tracks and adding parts recorded by LA session musicians (unfortunately without the input of YesWest or ABWH) in order to rush the album's release. The finished product was released as Union. It remains a controversial album and an album disliked by critics and Yes' members themselves.
    • Following Union's failure, Yes' new label tried to reunite the YesWest lineup for Talk, hoping for 90125-type sales, but the label did not promote the album as it was folding at the time.
    • 1996 brought the classic Anderson/Howe/Wakeman/Squire White lineup back for Keys To Ascension, but then Yes' management booked tour dates on top of Rick Wakeman's solo concerts, with he was contractually bound to and could not cancel. Wakeman would leave Yes before the tour began.
  • Singer-songwriter Michelle Branch was slated to release her first album with Reprise Records, Everything Comes and Goes, in November of 2009, with the lead single "Sooner or Later" released in June, two music videos produced by the summer, and full-length promo copies being sent to radio stations. Suddenly, all promotion for the album stopped, and it wasn't released on its scheduled date. After nearly a year, the album was shortened to a "Six Pak" EP and was quietly released in September 2010. Unsurprisingly, the EP tanked, failing to chart on the Billboard 200 altogether and only reaching #35 on the country albums chart.
    • Michelle seems to be going through the same phase right now with her current album, West Coast Time. Once again, the lead single, "Loud Music", was released in June of 2011, promo copies of the album (this time only six tracks, despite the album being full-length) were sent to radio stations, and a release date was scheduled for September 2011. At the end of 2012 there was no word on the album. Michelle has stated on Twitter that she has no idea when the album will be released, but began uploading songs from the album (including all six songs sent to radio stations) onto her Soundcloud account in August 2012, stated that she "finally figured out how to get new music to you guys and get back on the road" in October. West Coast Time was finally stated for release in Spring 2013, but no sign of it remained. It wasn't until Hopeless Romantic arrived nearly seven years later that she finally was able to officially release new music.
  • Possibly the ultimate positive example of the trope. As George Harrison and Jeff Lynne worked on GH's Cloud Nine, they wanted to release "This Is Love" as one of the singles - and needed a B-side to it. Lynne suggested that Roy Orbison, with whom he was about to record next, could make a guest appearance. Long story short: the song was finally recorded by a stellar supergroup The Traveling Wilburys including Harrison, Lynne, Orbison, Tom Petty and Bob Dylan and named "Handle With Care". When the Warner (Bros.) Records executives heard it, they rejected it outright - because they considered it too good to end up as a B-side. When the execs suggested that they would love to have an entire album recorded by the Wilburys, the guys responded with Volume 1 - one of the most critically and commercially acclaimed recordings of the 1980s.
  • Another positive example happened to Al Stewart while he was preparing to put out an album intended to drop in 1976. For close to a decade, he had been working on a song that he called "Foot of the Stage", inspired by the story of Tony Hancock, a British comedian who was a star in the '50s and '60s before committing suicide. His label, CBS Records, liked the music, but believed the song wouldn't make a splash in the US, seeing that Hancock was virtually unknown outside the UK, and suggested new lyrics. Stewart took the advice, but was suffering from writer's block. At the time, his then-girlfriend was reading a book on Vietnamese astrology, which gave the new song its title. Then, he was looking for something to watch on TV and stumbled across Casablanca, and decided to incorporate the names of two of its main actors, Humphrey Bogart and Peter Lorre, in the lyrics. The end result, "Year of the Cat", became the title track of said album, hit the US Top 10 and was his only UK Top 40 single, and remains a classic rock staple to this day.
  • This happened to Live, and how. Guitarist Chad Taylor says their album V was never supposed to be released at all (they intended to release an album called Ecstatic Fanatic which was going to be dedicated to the fans). They then wanted "Overcome" from the same album to be released as a charity single for 9/11 victims. MCA said no to that. The label also didn't hear their calls to take advantage of the band's songs in two successful movies that year, The Fast and the Furious and The Mummy Returns - at most only allowing the latter's song to get a video, and that after denying the the director of the former to do a video in the film set! The meddling ended up leading to the band becoming Ed Kowalczyk and some other guys, and Ed eventually writing entire albums with minimal input from the rest of the band. It all went downhill from there.
  • Part of the reason for Van Halen parting ways with both original lead singer David Lee Roth and producer Ted Templeman was allegedly (at least according to interviews Eddie Van Halen gave not long after the split) Templeman's insistence on the band recording cover songs for hits (Ted feeling that covers were halfway to success anyway) and his and Roth's opposition to Eddie using synthesizers and writing more ballads. Eddie took over production of 1984, leading to a number one album and number one single with the synth-heavy "Jump", but Eddie by then had enough of not being able to do enough of what he wanted to do on Van Halen albums. When Roth wanted to do more touring in 1985 rather than record a new album (Ed didn't want to tour without new music to promote, along with spending more time working on a vanity film project rather than write new material), it proved to be the last straw.
  • Record executives at Chrysalis Records capitalized on the "sexy rocker chick" persona Pat Benatar cultivated in the early 1980's, along with the success she had with hard rock feminist anthems like "Hit Me With Your Best Shot" and "Heartbreaker". Unknown to Pat or her bandmates, they published an ad for her Crimes of Passion album using the front cover of her album, but with her tank top airbrushed off to make it look like she was topless. This infuriated Pat, who already had to deflect passes from chauvinistic radio DJs who offered to promote her music more often if she'd sleep with them. This was, of course, during the days when females in rock were less common than nowadays, and few if any had full control over their careers and images. Pat and her lead guitarist husband Neil Giraldo took control of all aspects of her career from then on, and attempted to subvert her rocker chick persona by releasing the album Get Nervous with her in a straitjacket in a padded cell with frizzy hair, streaked makeup and wild eyes. Her success continued when she against went against her management's wishes and released the experimental, synth-heavy album Tropico, featuring the Number One Power Ballad "We Belong".
  • MCA Nashville was insistent on a "60 for 60" promotion to get George Strait's "Give It All We Got Tonight" to become his 60th #1 (on all charts, counting Billboard, Mediabase, and the defunct Gavin Report) despite a sluggish chart run. This resulted in alternate mixes being sent out, a spotlight on Bob Kingsley's Country Top 40, and rampant spamming of the song by various stations surveyed by Mediabase. They succeeded on Mediabase, whose charts are far more easily manipulated than Billboard.
  • Motörhead was originally signed to United Artists Records and recorded what was supposed to be their debut album in the winter of 1975 - '76. UA was not convinced that the record had any commercial potential, and shelved its release; Phil Taylor, Motörhead's drummer at the time, even claims that the band kept getting barraged with excuses when they pressed the company about the delays. In December of 1976, they recorded a single for Stiff Records, but was halted by UA, despite the fact that UA wasn't doing jack squat to promote them. Motörhead might have broken up then and there, but the rise of Punk Rock and the New Wave of British Heavy Metal proved favorable to the band's fortunes and were given an offer from Ted Carroll of Chiswick Records to let them record their self-titled debut, which consisted of rerecorded versions of the songs from the UA sessions.
  • Stephen Malkmus wanted to call his post-Pavement band The Jicks, but Matador Records resisted the idea, presumably thinking it'd be easier to promote the association with Pavement if he used his own name. Thus, what was meant to be the first album by the Jicks was released as a Self-Titled Album credited to Stephen Malkmus alone - as a nod to this, the CD version of the album had the word "Jicks" printed on the disc itself, while the vinyl has it printed in the inner sleeve. A compromise was made and subsequent albums were credited to Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks.
    • When Malkmus presented his label with his electronic solo album Groove Denied, the label balked at the idea of releasing a New Sound Album after a four year hiatus, and asked that he produce another indie rock album with The Jicks first. He did, and the result was Sparkle Hard, To be fair, Matador founder Chris Lombardi personally traveled to Portland to explain to Malkmus why the label thought the timing wasn't right for the album, and Groove Denied did get a belated release the next year.
  • Following their breakthrough Progressive Metal albums Images and Words and Awake, Dream Theater planned to record a massive double-album. The record label, on the other hand, wanted something much more accessible and radio-friendly. The result was Falling into Infinity, which while not a bad album is still regarded as one of the band's lesser works. Erstwhile drummer Mike Portnoy eventually released a two-disc collection of demos from the album's sessions (including most of the material cut from the album) on his label Ytsejam Records, which are closer to the band's intended artistic vision; many people like them more despite their lo-fi sound. After Falling into Infinity they would renegotiate their contract to ensure they had complete artistic control over their subsequent albums.
  • The Guess Who came by their name via executive meddling, albeit indirectly: They were going by the name Chad Allan & the Expressions when the label decided to credit their 1965 single, "Shakin' All Over", to Guess Who? as a marketing ploy - the idea being that speculation over the song actually being a pseudonymous recording by more famous musicians would fuel sales and radio play. Whether or not the gimmick actually helped, "Shakin' All Over" ended up being their first hit, and DJs kept announcing the song as being by Guess Who even after the ruse ended, so they effectively had to change their name.
  • Country Music singer James Bonamy had his debut single "Dog on a Toolbox" withdrawn after only a couple weeks because label execs believed that there were "too many dog songs", even though country songs about dogs are pretty much a Dead Unicorn Trope. They swapped it out with its B-side, "She's Got a Mind of Her Own". The switch confused a lot of program directors, thus undercutting "Mind"'s performance on the charts.
  • Megadeth have suffered this on several occasions:
    • Killing Is My Business... And Business Is Good originally used a cover design that was not what Dave Mustaine intended - the label lost his sketch and improvised a replacement at a low budget, leading to a result that the band were allegedly 'mortified' by, hence the 2001 remaster had a new cover based on Mustaine's original design. Also, "These Boots" was cut from reissues of their album because Lee Hazelwood objected to their lyric changes. Eventually he let them release it but only if the words were censored.
    • Youthanasia's producer Max Norman insisted that every song be 120bpm to ensure radio airplay. This did not happen with every song, but it was close. Executives at MTV thought the song "A Tout le Monde" was about suicide so did not play it even though the band and producer thought it was a sure-fire hit single.
    • The Cryptic Writings sessions were produced by Dann Huff, formerly of the hair metal band Giant and by that point working as a Country Music session guitarist. His only production credits at the time were for a few obscure country acts (although he would later be famous for his work with Lonestar, Rascal Flatts, and Keith Urban). Their then-new manager, Bud Prager, did not like the lyrics of "Bullprick", "Evil That's Within" and "Vortex", and made Mustaine change them. The former two were changed to "FFF" and "Sin" respectively, and the latter retained its name but had slightly different lyrics. Prager also convinced Mustaine to rework "I'll Get Even" into a far less angry song than originally planned. Prager also included strings on "A Secret Place".
    • Risk was largely the result of Executive Meddling, and is considered a failure because of it, again involving Huff and Prager. The inclusion of strings on "Insomnia", the recording of "Crush 'Em" (which Prager thought would become a sports anthem), and the remixed version of "Breadline" are just three reasons. After this, Mustaine resolved never to work with Prager again.
    • The Greatest Hits collection Capitol Punishment was a Contractual Obligation Project to finish off their deal with Capitol Records, which they didn't really want to release. They ended up including new songs "Kill The King" and "Dread and the Fugitive Mind" on it as new tracks. Whilst "Dread" would appear on Sanctuary's follow up album The World Needs a Hero, "Kill The King" had to remain an exclusive track to sell the album, but was later reissued on several compilations.
    • The World Needs a Hero was meant to be the band's return to form, but received barely any promotion.
    • ''The System Has Failed' was originally intended to be a Dave Mustaine solo album but the label wanted to call it Megadeth for marketing reasons. This turned out to be a good thing because it is considered their comeback, but it also annoyed Dave Ellefson (who wasn't part of the band) which meant it took him a few years to come back.
    • United Abominations was not intended to include "A Tout le Monde" (with Cristina Scabbia); it was meant to be a B Side. The label saw it as a potential single that would appeal to a younger audience. The track ended up replacing the planned album track "Black Swan", which was released as a pre-order bonus track and eventually rerecorded for their album Thirteen. In addition, "Gears of War" was included on the album as it was popular, even though Mustaine intended to record it as a one off. Both tracks actually did raise Megadeth's profile somewhat and the album endeared them to a younger audience.
    • Thirteen's "Millennium of the Blind", "Black Swan" and "New World Order" were all new recordings of old non-album tracks that were rerecorded at the request of the producer. "Deadly Nightshade" was an old song that had not been recorded. The plan was to get the band back to their roots by reworking much older material. Also, Dave Ellefson returned to the band due to demand, which turned out to be a good thing.
  • Ludwig van Beethoven was annoyed that the publisher of his piano sonata in E-flat major, "Das Lebewohl" translated the title into French as "Les adieux". (It was published as a companion piece to, of all kinds of compositions, a sextet for two horns and string quartet.)
  • Johann Sebastian Bach suffered low levels of Executive Meddling for his entire career, generally in the form of his employers requesting that he write simpler music. His preferred tactic for dealing with it was to quit and get a different job in a different town. He did this six times in 20 years, before finally settling in Leipzig in 1723, where he remained for the rest of his life.
  • Red Hot Chili Peppers dealt with a bit of Executive Meddling during the recording sessions for Blood Sugar Sex Magik. The band wrote and recorded "The Greeting Song" at the request of producer Rick Rubin, who demanded that the album contain at least one song about "girls and cars". Singer Anthony Kiedis himself has gone on record to say that he isn't too fond of the song.
  • Ween's live compilation Paintin' the Town Brown was intended to be the first release by the band's vanity label Chocodog, which would be pressed in limited quantities and sold exclusively through an e-commerce site run by the band. Instead of capturing what a typical show was like, it was meant to compile unusual performances their diehard fans might be interested in hearing (e.g. unreleased or rarely performed songs, performances from a lineup that was specifically formed to promote their country album 13 Golden Country Greats, and even two thirty minute jams). Their label, Elektra Records, then took the album out of the band's hands and released it themselves. Thus, what was only meant to be heard by a small amount of fans received a much wider release and became their first official Live Album.
  • Beatallica couldn't use their "The Beatles meets Metallica" lyrics in third album Abbey Load because Sony Music, owner of both their label and the Fab Four publishing catalogue, forced them to employ the original Beatles lyrics. George Harrison's estate also vetoed parodies of his songs from Abbey Road (one of which had the amusing title "Something Else Matters"). Straight lyrics do lend to Stealth Pun due to the Metallica songs used as backdrop ("Sun King" = "King Nothing", "The End" = "The End of the Line", "She Came In Through the Bathroom Window" = "Dirty Window"), and one still uses the hybrid chorus ("For Whom Michelle Tolls!").
  • Cat Stevens almost gave up his career after the lukewarm reception of Numbers, but his contract for Island Records required two more albums. The first of them, Izitso, proved to be a Career Resurrection for him. Shortly thereafter he converted to Islam, still with one album remaining in his contract. But once he was done recording Back to Earth he subsequently quit the music business — for the time being.
  • Giuseppe Verdi spent the better portion of his career dealing with the censors. Even Rigoletto went through this to please both them and his audience, but arguably Un ballo in maschera spent much time against censorship.
  • Gaetano Donizetti's opera Maria Stuarda was forcibly performed in 1834 as Buondelmonte in Naples because the queen was allegedly descended from Mary, Queen of Scots. Since neither the public nor Donizetti was pleased with Buondelmonte, he withdrew it so Maria Stuarda could be properly performed (which it was in Milan the following year).
  • Fresh off his #1 hit "A Guy Walks Into a Bar", Tyler Farr released the ballad "Withdrawals", which was positively received by fans, but moved slowly up the charts (not unusual for Farr's singles). Columbia Records pulled it after only three weeks and replaced it with "Better in Boots", because they wanted an up-tempo summery song that would sound good live and appeal to a female demographic better. The ads for the song in radio trade publications smack of desperation with their hammering home the fact that the song is "fun" and has "tempo". The song has been derided for being a pandering Cliché Storm, and stalled out at #26. This decision seems to have killed his career entirely, as the intended lead singles to his third album both stalled out in the 50s.
  • The label pressured Cult of Luna to include a remixed song on "Vertikal II". Johaness Persson thought remixes were a "waste of time" but picked the hardest song on Vertikal to remix, "Vicarious Redemption", a sprawling sludge metal epic. Justin Broadrick was the only person he could trust to do a good remix.
  • Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Sonata in B-flat major, KV 570 was originally published as a sonata for violin and piano. The violin part, almost certainly not composed by Mozart, is an unimaginative addition to a piece that plays perfectly well without it.
  • The Lost Trailers recorded a version of "Chicken Fried", a regional hit for a then-mostly unknown Zac Brown Band, in 2006. Zac Brown agreed that they could cut the song on the condition that they not put it out as a single, but the Trailers' label ignored this request and attempted to put it out as a single. When Zac heard their version on the radio, he called the Trailers' label and demanded that they not release it as a single; the label complied and the Trailers' version became a Missing Episode. A Popularity Redo of "Chicken Fried" later became the first #1 hit for the Zac Brown Band in 2008.
  • Self were working on two albums around the same time: Gizmodgery (1999), a smaller-budget self-produced album performed entirely on toy instruments released on independent label Spongebath, and Breakfast With Girls (2000), an album featuring a bigger budget and an outside Record Producer (Hugh Padgham), released on DreamWorks Records. The involvement of the larger label did affect both releases, but maybe not in the way you'd expect: DreamWorks liked the songs "Suzy Q Sailaway" and "Uno Song" so much they insisted that they be left off Gizmodgery and included on Breakfast With Girls instead - the two songs end up sticking out a bit stylistically on that album as a result, especially because "Suzy Q. Sailaway" was re-recorded with more conventional instrumentation, but "Uno Song" wasn't. The original recording of "Suzy Q Sailaway" featuring toy instruments was later released on Selfafornia, a free digital-only album distributed by the band.
  • According to this interview, Doug Supernaw's second album, Deep Thoughts from a Shallow Mind, was handled this way by BNA Records. The album's lead single was "State Fair", but some stations started playing his cover of David Allan Coe's "You Never Even Called Me by My Name" (which featured guest vocals from Coe, Merle Haggard, Waylon Jennings, and Charley Pride) instead. The label then chose to axe "State Fair" and officially push the Coe cover as a single, but the stations that actually were playing "State Fair" failed to add "Name", so the ensuing confusion blunted both singles. The album finally got back on track with its third and final single, a cover of Randy Travis's "What'll You Do About Me"... only for that song to get swiftly yanked when its Stalker with a Crush theme met resistance in the wake of the O. J. Simpson trials, leading to BNA dropping him entirely.
  • A meta-example: due to several instances of chart manipulation on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart in 2004, which (among other things) led to Reba McEntire's "Somebody" and Terri Clark's "Girls Lie Too" getting huge pushes to #1, Billboard changed that chart's methodology in 2005.
  • In a positive example, the name of Licensed to Ill by Beastie Boys comes from Def Jam Records rejecting their first title: Don't Be a Faggot. As you can imagine, the boys were really glad someone stepped in to prevent that choice.
  • In 1992, KMFDM recorded an album called Apart, where members Sascha Konietzko and En Esch each wrote and recorded one side of the album separately (using the same recording studio and working with the same guitarist, Günter Schulz). Their label, Wax Trax!, rejected En Esch's side for not sounding enough like KMFDM, then sent Sascha back to the studio to come up with more songs: As a result, the finished album, re-titled as Money, barely features En Esch at all and includes remixes of previously released songs intended to pad it to album length. A year later, En Esch produced his solo album Cheesy, which was also released on Wax Trax! and included songs that would have appeared on Apart.
  • *NSYNC:
    • In 1999, the group discovered their manager Lou Pearlman had been defrauding them of their share of profits. After a months-long legal battle with Pearlman, NSYNC successfully ended their contract with RCA Records and signed with Jive Records.
    • Though the group were in agreement about a temporary hiatus, which was originally planned as a six-month period after the Celebrity tour in May 2002, they were not all in agreement about an actual breakup. Lance Bass, JC Chasez, Joey Fatone, and Chris Kirkpatrick were asked by management and their label to keep their schedules open for studio time as they awaited Justin Timberlake’s return after his solo debut. Both Joey and Lance have gone on record about how they passed up TV offers and other opportunities in the early years of the hiatus, while Chris has stated he wasn’t ready for the band’s dissolution.
    • The muddled dissolution of the band played a part in both the meteoric rise of Justin’s solo career as well as the derailment of JC’s solo career. In 2019, Alex Greggs, a producer who worked with both NSYNC and JC, spoke at length in a podcast interview about Jive Records' sabotage of JC's debut solo album Schizophrenic. Greggs confirmed how Jive believed JC to be less marketable than Justin because the latter was more willing to abide by industry politics. After Schizophrenic flopped, Jive wrangled JC into making a sophomore album (tentatively titled Story of Kate), only to shelve it up to 2007. Chasez subsequently left Jive, and though he has not released any further solo records, he remains active in the industry as a songwriter and producer.
  • Sloan: Geffen Records choose not to provide their second album, Twice Removed with much promotion due to artistic disputes - Grunge and Alternative Rock were becoming increasingly popular at the time, but to Geffen's disappointment, Twice Removed was a New Sound Album that shifted away from those styles and towards Power Pop. The band would leave the label not long after.
  • Defied by Marc Almond and his then manager, Stevo Pearce, in the infamous office-trashing incident of 1983. Phonogram planned to promote Soft Cell's latest single, "Numbers", by giving away free copies of the duo's breakthrough hit, "Tainted Love", but Stevo considered this to be "degrading". Marc agreed with him and the pair (who continued to work together for several years after Soft Cell split, though they have since parted company) expressed their disgust by invading Phonogram's offices, where they smashed gold discs, let off a fire extinguisher and stabbed a set of speakers with scissors. Following this, Phonogram backed down. Parts of the video for "Soul Inside", released later the same year, appear to have been inspired by this escapade.
  • Alabama drummer Mark Herndon revealed that RCA Records always treated him like a hired hand and not an official member of the band: he rarely played the drum tracks in studio, and the label seemed to keep him around solely because they wanted to pitch Alabama as a quartet. He stopped receiving credit on the albums entirely starting with Dancin' on the Boulevard in 1997, and was ultimately booted from the band in the early 2000s. According to his autobiography, he was also banned from the tour bus in 1984 due to complaints about its temperature, was woefully underpaid relative to the other members, and was sued by the other members who said that he was overpaid for merch on their 2003 farewell tour. Lead singer Randy Owen even said that Herndon was never officially a member, and that the label pressured them into keeping him on the album covers.
  • 'Til Tuesday's "Voices Carry" was originally written from a man's point of view - Aimee Mann's lyrics were inspired by a male friend's relationship with a woman , and early live performances had different lyrics, most significantly ones that addressed the subject of the song with feminine pronouns. Their label saw potential for a hit, but were wary of the song being read as being about a closeted lesbian, so ultimately the lyrics were rewritten for the official released version.
  • After Brooks & Dunn split up, Ronnie Dunn continued to record for Arista Records Nashville. He put out a solo album which included the hits "Bleed Red" and "Cost of Livin'". While the third single "Let the Cowboy Rock" was climbing the charts, Arista abruptly booted him off the label, because they felt that his polling his Facebook followers on options for a fourth single was compromising "Cowboy"'s success.
  • Dierks Bentley got screwed over by his 2013 single "Bourbon in Kentucky", lead single to his album Riser. He had to pull the song after only six weeks because radio stations were absolutely refusing to play a moody ballad in the summertime. You'd think "lead single from an A-lister" would be enough reason to play the song anyway...
  • Country Music label Big Machine Records generally has a policy that albums are only released on the second single. This ended up backfiring a few times:
    • One of the first backfires was for Can You Duet winners Steel Magnolia, who had a big Top 5 hit on the country charts in 2009 with "Keep On Lovin' You". The second single "Just by Being You (Halo and Wings)" bombed, so the album got delayed. It was ultimately released on the heels of its third single "Last Night Again", but since that single wasn't going anywhere, neither did the album. Steel Magnolia later broke up (literally, as members Joshua Scott Jones and Meghan Linsey happened to be boyfriend and girlfriend), and Linsey later finished second on a season of The Voice.
    • Greg Bates hit Top 5 with "Did It for the Girl". Followup "Fill In the Blank" sank without a trace, and he was never heard from again.
    • Tucker Beathard got to #2 with his debut single "Rock On". But the second single "Momma and Jesus" fell short of Top 40, and Big Machine closed the branch that he was signed to (an In Name Only revival of the Dot Records name). After they closed the Dot division, "Rock On" was also pulled from all online distribution.
  • Country group Love and Theft managed to survive two things that can usually kill a band's momentum: their original label (Lyric Street Records) had gone out of business, and member Brian Bandas quit, reducing them to a duo consisting of Stephen Barker Liles and Eric Gunderson. When they signed to RCA Records Nashville, things were looking up. Their inaugural RCA single "Angel Eyes" went to #1 on the country music charts, hit Top 40 on the Hot 100, and received a digital platinum certification from the RIAA. But for some reason, the label dragged its heels for four months without announcing a followup. The resulting gap sapped all their momentum, and the other two singles failed to make it past #35. According to the duo themselves, a second RCA album was nearly completed, but it was shelved when its lead single "Night That You'll Never Forget" also bombed. One of the songs for the unreleased album, "Going Out Like That", later ended up being recorded by Reba McEntire. The duo had to resort to self-releasing their next single, "Whiskey on My Breath" and, while Curb Records later picked up distribution of the single, it still failed to go anywhere. Then-CEO of Sony Music Nashville Gary Overton stated that "They were making some great new music, but there was no excitement for them at radio or with the listeners" — even though "Angel Eyes" was an unquestionably huge hit, and it's hard to maintain a career when you have literally nothing to go on for a full third of a year...
  • Gary Overton was supposedly also the mastermind behind the bad decisions surrounding Jerrod Niemann's third Arista Records album. The lead single "Drink to That All Night" was a #1 smash on the country charts, despite its incredibly polarizing Auto-Tune-drenched hip-hop sound and dopey party-themed lyrics which all stood in contrast to the thoughtful and interesting material he had released previously. The followup single was "Donkey", a very audacious novelty song with innuendos that seemed to hint at sodomy... but apparently it was sent as a single simply because Overton loved it. Obviously, the notoriously conservative country music audiences rejected it wholesale, and his momentum collapsed instantly. "Donkey" was pulled after less than two months in favor of "Buzz Back Girl", and ad copy even called "Buzz Back Girl" the second single, but it was to no avail — it also fizzled out, and his fourth Arista album became a Missing Episode when its lead single also tanked. He moved to Curb Records for the next album, but its singles also performed miserably and almost no one even noticed the album's release.
  • Stabbing Westward are primarily an Industrial Metal/Alternative Metal band, but their 2001 Self-Titled Album, did away with most of the heavier and more "industrial" elements in favor of melodic Alternative Rock. Lead vocalist Christopher Hall initially downplayed it by saying they'd always been more melodic than typical industrial metal acts, and had just stopped trying to hide that element of their sound as much, but would later say this was due to the band being under new management - the original demos for the album were darker and heavier, but their manager rallied the band to a more radio-friendly sound to sell more records (against the majority of members' wishes), had their guitarist replaced with a new member who had much more of a Brit Pop / Glam Rock playing style, and even kicked Hall out of the recording studio for two weeks. Ironically, Stabbing Westward ended up being one of their worst-selling albums, which led to the band breaking up and not releasing another full album until 21 years later.
  • For the album Skull Ring, Virgin Records requested Iggy Pop collaborate with some artists that would appeal to a younger audience. The album ended up with two guest appearances each by Green Day and Peaches, one by Sum 41 (the only specific band the label insisted he work with), and three songs reuniting him with The Stooges note , while the rest of the songs were performed with The Trolls, his backing band for the previous album.
  • (həd) p.e. ended up in this after their self-titled Jive Records debut, which was untypically dark for a genre, didn't catch on at first and sold poorly. Jive eventually turned them into Linkin Park Lite for their 2000 follow-up Broke and 2003's Blackout, demanding more commercial availability, and restricting their topics to depression, teen angst and relationships. It ultimately resulted in probably their most well-known single "Bartender" (sometimes it even gets mistakenly attributed to Linkin Park or P.O.D.), and their Billboard best-charted album, but the band hated the experience, their first post-Jive album had some Take That! at "the industry [that's] dumbing down the nation" and "phony punk bands crying about relationships". Jive promptly released compilation of their best hits against their Suburban Noize debut album on the same day (06.06.06), the move which frontman Jared Gomez described as infuriating and dismissed the compilation proclaiming they never had a hit.
  • John Lydon's first (and so far only) solo album Psycho's Path had five remixes added as "bonus tracks" at the record label's insistence - four of these were remixes of songs that actually appeared on the album, with the remaining remix being of "Open Up", a song by Leftfield that Lydon had appeared on four years earlier. The album ran a bit short at ten songs in 40 minutes, and the remixes were meant to attract fans of electronic music who had made "Open Up" a dance-club hit.
  • Jimmie Rodgers recorded a song called Prohibition Has Done Me Wrong but it was shelved, supposedly by record producer Ralph Peer by for being too controversial for its time, and the master recording was later lost.
  • Karma To Burn were performing as an instrumental group for years, but when Roadrunner Records signed them, the label insisted that they tour and record with a vocalist. Thus Jay Jarosz, a friend of the band, was added to the lineup on vocals - after one album and tour they decided to fire him and were subsequently dropped by Roadrunner. The band kept recording albums that were mostly instrumental on other labels though, leaving their Self-Titled Album a bit of Early-Installment Weirdness.
  • The Marshall Mathers LP was 100% complete before Eminem was forced to add one more track, per request by the Interscope Records execs. They wanted a Spiritual Successor to the zany pop anthem "My Name Is" for the lead in radio single. As we all know, the result was "The Real Slim Shady". The song's intent is quite obvious, since it doesn't sound like anything else on the entire album. Interestingly enough, Eminem went through a mountain of writer's block to reach that point, and he let out his surmounting frustration with the vitriolic (though excellent) "The Way I Am". According to Em, his displeasure with being typecast by the higher ups fueled a brief feud between him and Interscope, which nearly got him kicked off the label. Of course, this corporate conflict ended up resulting in two great songs off a highly acclaimed and commercially successful album, so this could be a case of Tropes Are Not Bad.
  • Jason Donovan's fourth album, "All Around the World", was an obscure New Sound Album that suffered through executive meddling from Polydor. Originally, the album was going to have the entire tracklist with new songs, but Polydor thought that it would be more successful if some of his songs from his previous albums were included. Jason Donovan was not happy about this decision, but he had to accept it anyway. Jason didn't have a good relationship with Polydor, and when this album failed, he ended up being kicked out of the record label, thus cutting his deal with Polydor short. He didn't come back to music, until 2007, when he made and released the album "Let it be Me". He ended up coming back to the Polydor label for his 2012 album "Sign of Your Love".
  • The Christian Rock group MercyMe ran into this when it came to the first single for their first major-label release, "Almost There" in 2001. The label, INO Records, wanted to capitalize on the popularity of the 2000 Bruce Wilkinson book "The Prayer of Jabez"note , by having MercyMe record a song titled "Bless Me Indeed (Jabez's Song)". Despite lead vocalist Bart Millard's open reluctance; the band did record the song, which was released to radio in 2001 but did poorly on radio despite initially mixed-to-positive reviews (in a podcast interview years later; Millard would call the song one of the worst ever recorded by the group). Fortunately for MercyMe; their next single, "I Can Only Imagine"note , performed far better, reaching the top of the charts and becoming the group's Signature Song.
  • Live's Chad Taylor had plenty to complain about what transpired once their label Radioactive Records folded into MCA/Universal. The label pushed for a more commercial vein in the eventual album V, even choosing "Simple Creed" as a single only because it had a rapper note  . Director Rob Cohen decided to add their song “Deep Enough” to the intro of The Fast and the Furious, the studio offered to shoot a video on the set, the label shot it down. The producers of The Mummy Returns ask if Live could make a song for the credits, and the label only accepted to make a music video for "Forever May Not Be Long Enough", not issue a single - making the band basically an invisible presence in two box office hits. And even as “Overcome" was becoming an airplay hit for helping the nation cope with healing after 9\11, there was still no support from MCA. This all led to a severe energy drain, to the point he considered suicide while on tour.
  • RCA Records Nashville allegedly dropped Steve Vaus after his single "We Must Take America Back" was only on the charts for one week. While they claimed it was due to stations lacking interest in the song (it only got to #68 on the country charts and many stations said they outright refused to play it), Vaus claimed that he was being "silenced" due to the song's extremely political message.
  • Sumerian Records were pushing their Progressive Metal artists to do double albums for a period of time. The thought process being that having two albums out within a short span of each other would boost streaming numbers. This worked for Between the Buried and Me with the double album Automata, which many consider a strong listening experience. This backfired with Born of Osiris with The Simulation, which was billed as double album, but writer’s block and a heavy touring schedule killed that plan. Since then, Sumerian has stopped the double album practice.
  • After For Squirrels' lead singer John Vigliatura and bassist Bill White died in an automobile accident, the remaining members of the band formed a new project called Subrosa. For Squirrels' previous album Example had done well enough commercially that their label wanted the group to be billed as a new lineup of For Squirrels for the sake of name recognition, but the band weren't comfortable with it. As a compromise, the album Never Bet The Devil Your Head was credited to Subrosa, but with a sticker reading "formerly For Squirrels" placed on the shrink-wrap of the album.

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