Follow The Leader / Music

• Classical Music is littered with examples of this trope; pieces of music considered revolutionary at the time they premiered would often spawn scores of imitators, sometimes to the point of changing musical tastes and convention the world over. This isn't just true of music that was well-received upon its inception, either; Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring was so controversial that the audience at its premiere rioted, and yet it's been so influential in the modern era that much of 20th-century orchestral music might as well be called "The Rewrite of Spring".
• Ludwig van Beethoven: Established the idea of a composer as an individual instead of a tunesmith working for the Church and/or the government. Without him the entire Romantic period in classical music might never have happened...
• Louis Armstrong: His popularity showed many Afro-Americans that the white establishment would give you status, money and artistic merit if you started a jazz band. Similar joyful jazz performers such as Cab Calloway also own a lot to him. Armstrong's The Complete Hot Five and Hot Seven Recordings basically paved the way for all Jazz artists to come and popular music in general.
• Duke Ellington: The first jazz band leader with a serious image, much like a composer of classical music. He inspired Count Basie, Thelonious Monk, and Miles Davis, among others.
• Billie Holiday: The first female singer to become world famous by singing melancholical songs about unfaithful men, alcohol, drugs and racism. Still copied to this day. Her album Lady in Satin paved the way for all albums by female musicians who express their soul in Brutal Honesty, especially those who went through years of drug abuse, such as Nina Simone, Janis Joplin, Marianne Faithfull, Amy Winehouse,...
• Frank Sinatra: Started off as a teen idol, admired by countless women and hated by equally many men. His success paved the way for, of course, countless good looking male and thus bankable male singers, from Elvis Presley, Cliff Richard, The Beatles, all those boys bands, Michael Jackson (in his early days) to Justin Bieber.
• Gene Krupa: Drummers become an important part of jazz bands thanks to his wild way of playing the instrument.
• Muddy Waters: First blues singer to use electric guitars to provide a heavier sound. Also the first one to not simply sing about melancholy, but also pure erotic lust. Both very influential on later blues artists, as well as British blues/rock performers like The Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton and Led Zeppelin.
• Elvis Presley popularized rock 'n' roll to a huge world wide audience. Various Elvis like artists all copied his hairstyle, way of dressing and took up a guitar to perform rock songs.
• Chuck Berry's frenetic guitar playing has been copied by every early rock guitarist. Only Jimi Hendrix had perhaps a larger influence!
• Little Richard's exciting performing style has equally inspired many rock artists ever since.
• Similarly, after Buddy Holly died in a plane crash in 1959, many singers attempted to imitate Holly's distinct vocal style, including Bobby Vee, Tommy Roe, Del Shannon, and Jimmy Gilmer and the Fireballs.
• James Brown's combination of catchy tunes, endless grooves, energetic performances, Afro-American pride, cool dance moves and sexual innuendo have been imitated by many singers, especially Iggy Pop, Michael Jackson, George Clinton, Prince, Lee Perry, Fela Kuti... and EVERY other rap artist ever since.
• The Beatles:
  • After their big American debut breakthrough and their continuing world wide fame afterwards countless Beatles imitators popped up. Most of them especially copied the mop-top hairstyle, comedic antics and sometimes even fake British accents. Even those who didn't directly copy them were inspired to start a rock band just because of them.
  • This is also, interestingly, the reason for the creation of Pavel Chekov of Star Trek: The Original Series.
  • The Monkees were also based on the Beatles (not just musically; the show was originally pitched as a serial version of A Hard Day's Night), but the wildly different influences of the four Monkees and their assorted music producers & TV directors broke them out of Follow the Leader mode before the first season had ended.
  • The success of The Beatles also created something never seen before: a British musical invasion. Every British pop/rock artist who made it big internationally (David Bowie, Elton John, George Michael, Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, The Spice Girls, The Who, The Kinks, The Yardbirds, The Rolling Stones, The Moody Blues, Pink Floyd...) might have never been taken seriously if the Beatles didn't do it before them.
  • The film A Hard Day's Night also became the blueprint for every "good" teenage rock movie ever since. A lot of music videos owe a lot to the way director Richard Lester set the Beatles' music to exciting images.
  • The idea of a rock group re-inventing itself after each new album was more or less invented by The Beatles. Especially in the 1960s and 1970s a lot of famous bands like The Who, The Rolling Stones and Pink Floyd tried to experiment with new sounds, styles and themes on each album.
  • The idea of an album as more than a collection of singles plus filler really took off at this time due to albums such as Rubber Soul and Revolver.
  • The release of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band kicked off a craze of lushly-orchestrated psychedelic music and concept albums (like Tommy by The Who and S.F. Sorrow by The Pretty Things). A few years later, there was a deliberate "back to basics" movement away from such bloated production... that just happened to start up after the less-elaborate The White Album was released.
  • In Japan there was a whole new genre born out of these attempts, the Group Sounds genre, which lasted roughly half a decade before being replaced by the New Rock spinoff genre, but not before birthing a number of popular bands such as The Tigers (Kenji Sawada's big break), The Tempters (The Rolling Stones to the Tigers' The Beatles), and The Spiders (The Hollies to the other two).
  • The Beatles have the distinction of being so Beatles as to having followers for different eras of their music. The Beatlemania era? See Britpop. Sgt. Pepper and Yellow Submarine? Check out the Psychedelic Rock and Progressive Rock scenes (which bred Acid Rock and Heavy Metal).
• Bob Dylan popularized folk music and "authenticity" as a musical artist. He became the first pop artist with a much larger emphasis on personal, meaningful lyrics than musical accompaniment, widely imitated by several artists ever since, from John Lennon to Leonard Cohen.
• The Jackson 5 and The Osmonds have inspired many family bands with the lead singer being the youngest in the 70s like The Defranco Family.
• The Rolling Stones: The first rock group with a "bad, dangerous" image, later topped by countless imitators, from The Who, Black Sabbath, Alice Cooper, The Sex Pistols, Nirvana to Marilyn Manson and Eminem.
• Black Sabbath's success in the early '70s propelled heavy metal into mainstream pop radio. Blue Oyster Cult, which had little in common stylistically with Sabbath, was dubbed "the all-American Black Sabbath" by its producer in an attempt to cash in on the craze.
• Though New Edition actually came first, the Boy Band craze of the nineties was actually started by New Kids on the Block in the late 1980s. These pre-fab moneymakers seemed to be "built" from a mix of stereotypes: one or two pretty boys; a rebel with tattoos (rehab optional); the crazy one who gave the really funny quotes in the interviews; one who could actually sing, but looked funny; the sweet, down-to-earth one; and the schmoe. For the most part, good looks and flashy dance moves were a bigger priority than actual musical ability. Pop-Culture Isolation is also likely why NKOTB is known for starting the Boy Band craze as opposed to New Edition (not to mention NKOTB had a wide appeal in contrast to New Edition's mostly-black audience), even though their music was hardly different.
  • Maurice Starr was the svengali behind both NKOTB and New Edition, both bands based around the Boston area.
• Despite not being the first female pop star Madonna did become the trend setter for many female singers in the late 1980s and 1990s. Many have tried to copy her daring attitude, mixing eroticism in your act and focusing a lot on fashion. Even in the 1980s you had Tiffany, Debbie Gibson, and Janet Jackson, followed by Mariah Carey, The Spice Girls, Christina Aguilera, Britney Spears throughout the 1990s and P!nk, Lady Gaga and so forth later.
  • Of that vintage, only Alanis Morissette is still a legitimate popular star, after starting to use her full name and becoming Darker and Edgier. Alanis was only a teen pop star in Canada. In fact, once she became famous in the States, her management and record company did everything in their power to block her earlier Canadian material from being released in America, in order to preserve the "edgier" image they had created and were cashing in on.
  • Britney Spears was the first of the "teen pop starlets" of the new millennium (thank you very much, Total Request Live).
    • Britney Spears' success hasn't stopped the Disney Channel from trying to build up the next best thing. Hilary Duff, Selena Gomez and Miley Cyrus followed her direct inspiration within Disney and within them as young women.
    • In turn, an alternate scene dubbed by the media as the "anti-Britney" movement made headway after the success of Avril Lavigne, a teenage star who countered the trend of teenage pop performers by writing (or co-writing) their own material and performing with musical instruments, adopting a more "rock" image and sound, downplaying the sexualized, slick, choreographed Idol Singer image Britney and her fellow pop stars adopted, and by asserting (or giving the impression of asserting) control of their musical input, often with a feministic "Girl Power" message attached to it. Artists like Michelle Branch, Vanessa Carlton, Skye Sweetnam, and Sara Bareilles followed Avril, while Demi Lovato and Taylor Swift took strong cues from that scene within more commercial styles. Mandy Moore, who began as a Britney-like teen pop starlet (with dyed blonde hair), even tried to re-emerge in the movement after her reinvention with her album Wild Hope. The scene enjoyed a resurgence in the 2020s with Olivia Rodrigo and Willow Smith, who reinvented herself as an artist of this genre after starting out as an R&B artist.
    • Billie Piper began her career as a teen pop starlet. After a brief music career, a marriage to DJ Chris Evans, and a few years' gap, she now has a respectable acting career. Doctor Who was not her first TV part.
  • The Mickey Mouse Club is to blame for many pop artists of the late nineties. Spears, Aguilera, and Justin Timberlake and JC Chasez of *NSYNC got their start on the show.
  • The boy band trend spilled over into country music. Rascal Flatts was a boy band with a steel guitar on their early albums.
  • The success of Hanson, an at-the-time pre-teen pretty boy band (they were, however, truly a band, as all sang, wrote or co-wrote their own material, played their own instruments and had input into their material and image from the start) and their major label debut Middle Of Nowhere, and infectious Jackson Five-like number one single, "MMMBop", released in 1997 at the height of grunge and nu-metal, was also very influential in the popularity of teen-pop in the late '90s.
  • Justin Bieber is said to have ushered (no pun intended) in a new wave of teen pop artists. However, due to the large backlash against Bieber, these acts have been largely unsuccessful; the only act who was able to replicate the teen phenomenon that he created was UK boy band One Direction.
  • Big Time Rush was responsible in the resurgence of the boy band movement. Afterwards, bands like JLS, The Wanted, and One Direction came onto the scene. The lattermost band eventually got to open for BTR on their 2012 tour — and would go on to become astronomically more successful than BTR themselves.
• Another trend that begin at the turn of the millennium. The "Latin Boom." It started with Ricky Martin and Jennifer Lopez, and then there was a long string of people singing in both English and Spanish (Shakira, Marc Anthony, Thalia, Paulina Rubio). Even Christina Aguilera got in on the game.
• Mitch Benn's "Everything Sounds Like Coldplay Now" satirises the fact that, well, everything sounds like Coldplay now. Whether he was aware that two of the bands that he name-checks in the song did it first is unknown. Either way, the song is hilarious.
  • In fact, Coldplay themselves are often accused of ripping off Travis and/or Radiohead. So was Muse, but they essentially became an alt-prog band after their second record.
• In the same vein, much of the late-90s to mid-2000s Top 40 alternative/rock music is essentially knocking off the previous "alternative band", and those surrounding them, which are all knocked off of the basic chords of Canon in D. While you can blame Kurt Cobain for the phenomenon, it was almost definitely started earlier. Still continues to this day, as much of the radio and Top 40 is virtually indistinguishable from each other. Parodied hilariously by Rob Paravonian's "Pachelbel Rant".
• Back in The '90s, after Nirvana really blew up, record labels scrambled to sign any act that was even remotely grunge-y. The absurdity reached a fever pitch when Sony Records went all the way to Australia to sign Silverchair, whose members weren't even old enough to shave. It worked.
  • Nirvana also led to the signing of many acts that were underground, but not grunge, such as Green Day. This occasionally led to incredibly mainstream unfriendly acts getting signed (Boredoms, anyone?) Those acts seldom lasted long on the labels, however, which was probably for the better, as they didn't have to worry about being screwed by the label.
  • Grunge is arguably one of the most famous and most far-reaching examples. Following the success of Nirvana, anyone who had a remotely similar look or sound (very remotely similar sound) was signed, including several other Northeast bands. Thus came the age of Alternative Rock. While diverse at first, then came Post-Grunge and Nu Metal and the rest is history.
  • When Nirvana was the most successful "grunge" act, most Post-Grunge bands looked and sounded like them. When Pearl Jam outsold them, you started seeing yarling and bands like Creed and Days of the New.
• Back in The '80s, Europe was all about the New Wave, Synth-Pop, hi-NRG, italo disco or whatever other type of dance pop music was popular at the time. Once the German duet Modern Talking started making tracks that were like an eclectic mix of synth-pop & italo disco, everyone wanted to follow their style of music, like C.C. Catch (produced by Dieter Bohlen who was still one half of Modern Talking), Blue System (formed by post Modern Talking Dieter Bohlen), Bad Boys Blue (who tried their hardest to sound like they were produced by Dieter Bohlen) etc..
• Italo Disco itself became so big that eventually a lot of it didn't even come from Italy anymore.
• Similarly, after Mötley Crüe and later Bon Jovi and Poison became huge, record labels signed every Hair Metal band they could find to cash in on them. One extreme example involves MCA's signing of Pretty Boy Floyd when they had only played eight shows at the time!
  • Other bands signed by major labels were packaged as hair metal bands despite the fact that they weren't. Power Pop band Enuff Z'Nuff were dressed in vaguely psychedelic glam clothing by their label and appeared in glammy music videos. This unfortunately caused the average music fan to get an incorrect perception of what the band actually sounded like, much to the lament of the critics that adored them.
  • This may sound bizarre, but a lot of the Hair Metal acts didn't initially try copying Mötley Crüe, but actually began as record labels' attempt to create a "new Led Zeppelin." One proof of this? Though it's blasphemous to say anyone but Sabbath created metal nowadays, in the '80s, it was universally accepted amongst glammers that Zeppelin kick-started the genre.
• Korn released their Self-Titled Album in 1994 to unexpected success. Naturally, many bands looked to replicate that success by copying their style of murky down-tuned guitars, "funky" slap-style bass technique, angsty lyrics, and complete removal of guitar solos. This eventually led to the creation of the Nu Metal genre. Naturally, KoRn took note of this and later released an album called Follow the Leader in reference to it.
  • And depending on where you go, you may hear people say that Korn was mostly just following Alice in Chains' and Faith No More's lead.
  • There's also the Deftones who came shortly after. They introduced the addition of the (normally Hip-Hop-exclusive) turntables as an instrument, which later bands (most famously Limp Bizkit and Linkin Park)replicated. While the Deftones used turntables to subtly integrate samples into their music, the bands that followed them usually incorporated tricks like beat-juggling and scratching that were popular with rock-friendly hip-hop acts like Cypress Hill and House of Pain.
• After 2pac's death loads of rappers tried to duplicate his image and music (minus the socio-political commentary)
• Once Bone Thugs-n-Harmony became popular a lot of other rappers emerged with a melodic R&B styled rap delivery (minus the speed). In fact their influence can still be heard all the way into The New '10s.
• After Jefferson Airplane, Jimi Hendrix and The Doors hit big in the late '60s, major labels signed every psychedelic act they could find. Some found genuine talent: The jazz label Verve Records signed The Velvet Underground and Frank Zappa. Warner signed the The Grateful Dead, although they used their contract to make three wildly uncommercial albums before making their two classic records in 1970 (after which, they promptly split from the label). And EMI, looking for a band that sounded similar to The Beatles' new psychedelic sound, signed a small psychedelic band called Pink Floyd. Other labels weren't so lucky and were stuck with multi-million dollar contracts with one hit wonders like The Strawberry Alarm Clock, The Ultimate Spinach, Bubble Puppy and The Electric Prunes.
• Amy Winehouse inspired a retro-blues movement that includes Duffy, Adele, Paloma Faith, and possibly Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings. She also led to a major resurgence in the popularity of female singer-songwriters in general all over the world, with the likes of Lady Gaga, Florence Welch and Jessie J, all of whom have emerged since Back to Black's release, crediting Winehouse with paving the way for them and making it easier for them to have mainstream success.
  • For Winehouse herself, she was not shy about how much she idolized Ronnie Spector, having done so much to emulate Spector's singing style and physical appearance. It was enough that when Spector saw a picture of Winehouse in the New York Post without her glasses on, Spector mistook it to be a picture of herself.
• All over the place in Country Music:
  • In the 1990s, the "hat act" craze was in full bloom in country music. Many young, hot acts were kicking off their careers in their mid-20s like George Strait did, and usually wore cowboy hats, jeans and pressed shirts just like George. While this gave the genre many talented megastars in the likes of Alan Jackson, Clint Black, and Garth Brooks, and Kenny Chesney managed to move on from being a generic "hat act" to a well-respected artist after 2000, it also gave the genre plenty of bland radio fodder pretty boys. Over time, "hat act" became a derogatory term.
  • A more positive example started by Strait was the return to a more traditional, fiddle-and-steel sound following the crossover-happy early 80s. This led to very hardcore, neo-trad acts such as Randy Travis, Ricky Skaggs, and the aforementioned Alan Jackson, while concurrently decreasing the success of more pop-sounding acts such as Ronnie Milsap, Kenny Rogers and Alabama.
  • Similarly, the success of Brooks & Dunn in the early 1990s led to the creation of countless mainstream-sounding singer-songwriter duos, none of whom came even close to touching Brooks & Dunn's success — most couldn't even get a Top 40 hit. For nearly 20 years, the "Duo of the Year" category at the Academy of Country Music and Country Music Association was a mere formality. Things didn't turn around until 2006, when Sugarland (who, despite being another singer-songwriter duo, has a more diverse sound) finally snagged a Duo award. B & D retired in 2010.
  • Shania Twain opened the door for country-pop crossover females, in turn allowing Faith Hill, Martina McBride, and the Dixie Chicks to become country-pop crossovers in their own right. However, unlike Shania's rock-flavored country, Faith and Martina opted for a slick, belting style, and the Chicks favored a blend of traditional fiddle-and-steel and pop. Many other females in Nashville in the late 90s-early 2000s followed the Faith/Martina template, but most never caught on, and by 2003, females started to lose favor in country music. (This was brought on by Faith's Cry album being too pop for country audiences, Martina suffering a serious case of Issue Drift, and the Chicks getting negative publicity for clashes with Toby Keith followed by an ill-received comment that the lead singer made about then-president George W. Bush.) The fallout was so harsh that to this day, most females highly struggle to get a hit in country music (except Carrie Underwood and Miranda Lambert).
  • Gretchen Wilson's "Redneck Woman" and to a lesser extent, Jason Aldean's "Hicktown" both seem to have started the long-lasting trend of hard-rock country songs in which the singers assert that yes, they are country singers because they listen to Merle Haggard and George Jones, they wear boots and worn-out jeans, they're bad boys/girls who love their mamas, etc. Most singers were brought to this by way of John Rich of Big & Rich, who wrote the aforementioned songs but has mostly backed off from songwriting.
  • Florida Georgia Line's "Cruise" and Luke Bryan's "That's My Kind of Night" spawned the widespread "bro-country" movement of 2013 and 2014. Many country songs in this timespan have a strong hip-hop influence to them, and are usually about hot girls, beer, and trucks. Their success has also rubbed off on collaborators, such as "Cruise" co-writer Chase Rice and former Luke Bryan merchandise vendor Cole Swindell, both of whom draw heavily from FGL and Luke in their own material — although they're far from the only new acts to do so. "Bro-country" became so big that in the second half of 2014, Maddie & Tae mocked it with "Girl in a Country Song".
  • The runaway success of Sam Hunt's first album seems to have inspired bro-country's successor in the form of contemporary R&B-influenced country music, replete with snap beats, wordy talk-singing verses, and occasional Auto-Tune.
• In general, whenever a secular music artist becomes popular and spawns imitators, the Christian Music industry will take notice and scramble to find bands and stars to fit the mold, so Christian kids will have "wholesome alternatives" to whatever's popular in the secular music biz. Sadly, this often means that several genuinely good, unique Christian bands get completely ignored, or go Indie when their label pressures them to mimic a popular style.
• Emo Music first started in The '80s and has changed a lot since then, but more recently the enormous mainstream success of angsty hardcore-influenced bands such as The Used, My Chemical Romance and Taking Back Sunday seems to have proven that emo teenagers are a good audience to target. Thus every cookie-cutter pop punk act now has to over-straighten their hair, have the odd tattoo or piercing and wear eyeliner and overly tight jeans. See Metro Station, Boys Like Girls, etc.
• In the early-to-mid '90s R&B acts followed 2 archetypes. One type was the 4 to 5 member group type with gospel-inspired harmonies ala En Vogue and Boyz II Men. The second type followed the 2 to 3 group member formula that was based on a edgy, sexually explicit street/Hip-Hop look and sound ala TLC and SWV (the latter soften their hard edge look though, to a more soft feminine style). Some were terrible rehashes and copycats, while others were good in their own right.
  • Groups like H-Town and Jodeci were a unique (at the time) fusion of the 2 aforementioned archetypes.
• In 1978, the album Van Halen was released with Eddie Van Halen's fretboard-tapping "Eruption" heard round the world. Two years later, Randy Rhoads' playing on Ozzy Osbourne's Blizzard of Ozz cemented fast, classical-inspired guitar playing known as "shredding" as the new standard. Every lead guitarist in heavy metal—and many even in hard rock and pop music—had to play blazing fast solos, preferably with fretboard tapping, until the rise of grunge in the early 90s killed off the trend.
• Composer Anton Bruckner's massive, complex symphonies directly influenced Gustav Mahler's even bigger and more complex symphonies, as Mahler was a student at the Conservatory and attended concerts at the Vienna Philharmonic that premiered Bruckner's works.
• A lot of the post-disco, new wave funk/electro funk/synth funk bands that came out of the late 70's early 80's that died a quick death fall under this trope (though the whole subtly racist "death to disco" residual backlash also might be to blame, but that's a different can of worms). The more popular ones were groups like Cameo, Zapp Band, Debarge, Evelyn King, and The Gap Band, but the rest came and went, bands like: The Jets, The SOS Band (for all intents and purposes were a 2 hit wonder), Skyy, The System, Starpoint, Midnight Starr, The Force M.D.'s, Klymaxx, Ready for the World, and Kleer. Although it's debatable on whether or not they weren't better than the other bands that did get huge, 'cause quite a few of these groups have a significant cult following. Partially due to being Sampled Up.
• Michael Jackson's Thriller videos were a game changer for the music video industry. Up to that point, videos were mostly either glorified concert performances or experimental art projects (sometimes both), and few included dancing. Jackson introduced sensational dance moves and line-dancing with other dancers, something that was quickly copied by almost every popular music artist afterwards. While he is often credited with creating the concept of, well, the Concept Video, those existed before Jackson— what he did popularize were big-budget, special effects-heavy examples of the form.
  • Jackson was also one of the first to work with an established director of films for his Concept Video: Thriller was directed by John Landis, who Jackson recruited after watching (and loving) An American Werewolf in London.
  • A decade earlier, the clip to Bohemian Rhapsody from A Night at the Opera by Queen is widely credited with popularising the idea of the Concept Video, a music video that was anything other than just a performance of song. (It wasn't actually the first, but it was the first one to really get attention for doing this and inspire imitators.)
• Janet Jackson could be credited (or blamed) for sowing the seeds of the raunchy Stripperific R&B dancer types. Starting with Aaliyah (although she was tame by today's standards) who then paved way for people like Ashanti, Ciara, Rihanna, Brook Valentine, Mya, Christina Millian, so on, and so on. Some say Adina Howard helped too. Before her some would point to Vanity/Appolonia 6, making this Older Than They Think.
• As parodied by MADtv, The Calling and Creed were accused of ripping off Pearl Jam (particularly Eddie Vedder's Yarling - which the video points out is a style Older Than They Think).
• Christina Aguilera's critics like to point out how she seems to be hopelessly behind every trend in pop, the standard '90s pop at the start of her career, the R&B/Rock/Pop/Jazz second album, the 40's 50's 60's sounds which were popular only 5 years before and Bionic, its electronic pop sound which happened four years prior never exactly hitting the trend when it's at its trendiest. "Bionic" was a big blow to her image and her way of working and took the sheen off her for a lot of people.
• The main complaint people have with Metallica's Load and ReLoad records is that their music stylings were uncannily similar to the grunge/alternative bands that were popular at the time (albeit with an obvious blues/country influence).
• After T-Pain started using Auto-Tune to make his voice sound robotic, so did… well, nearly everyone else.
• The Sex Pistols launched punk in the U.K. and inspired countless people to start their own band solely based on attitude and less on skills.
• The success of Bob Marley paved the way for many reggae artists to copy his look, musical style and dabbling with rastafarian ideas. Even non-Jamaican artists!
• English singer David Gray believes the success of his 1998 album "White Ladder" paved the way for "soul-baring" male solo singer-songwriters such as James Blunt, Ed Sheeran, George Ezra, James Bay and Tom Walker.
• Equally rap and hip-hop music went through its share of shameless imitators as well. Let's see:
  • Joyful rap music based on a sample was popularized by The Sugarhill Gang
  • Rap songs about social and political themes were vivid in the 1980s, mostly inspired by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five and Run–D.M.C..
  • African-American rap itself inspired a lot of white folks copying the style, such as Beastie Boys, Vanilla Ice and Eminem.
  • The trend in rap of mainly bragging about your decadent lifestyle and using stock phrases such as "you know what I'm sayin'" has also been copied by almost EVERY rap artist nowadays to the point that they have to "prove" whether they are "keeping it real or not".
• Thanks to how huge Mumford & Sons have gotten in recent years, there has been a huge resurgence of Folk Music such as the Lumineers, Of Monsters and Men, Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes, the Avett Brothers, and more trying to capitalize off of Mumford's success. ^note  Some of these bands, such as the Avett Brothers, have been around earlier than Mumford but only got more attention after Mumford got big.
• Stoner Rock and Doom Metal have been on a seemingly never-ending upswing ever since 2008 thanks to a series of unusually successful artists releasing unusually successful albums, including such from Electric Wizard and Jex Thoth. The recent pop success of Ghost and Black Sabbath supercharged the occult/retro/doom metal scene.
• Animals as Leaders and Periphery pretty much gave djent its identity of lots of complex and heavy chugging mixed with lush and clear interludes.
• When Lifelover started releasing experimental albums and doing known performances where vocalist Kim "( )" Carlsson would self harm himself on stage, a lot of bands in the DSBM scene began to follow the band style, even blatantly copying them (Why hello Vanhelga◊).
• It's safe to bet that three quarters of electronic/EDM artists (or even artists, period) working and producing today wouldn't be where they were without Aphex Twin, hailed as the founding father of contemporary electronic music as a whole, but especially as the father of IDM (intelligent dance music, although he requests that people use the term "braindance"). Besides that, Aphex has even influenced non-electronic musicians like Radiohead.
• Ever since Ed Sheeran's success, countless other English folk-style singers like James Bay, James Arthur, Passenger, George Ezra and even Niall Horan (despite being Irish) have started popping up on the American charts.
• The smash success of Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee's "Despacito" remix (with Justin Bieber) in summer 2017 led to several other reggaeton songs getting remixes with mainstream pop artists, such as J Balvin's "Mi Gente" with Beyoncé, "Subeme La Radio" by Enrique Iglesias and Sean Paul, and "Bailemos" by CNCO featuring Little Mix, as well as the rise of reggaeton music in general.
• In the Japanese Pop Music world, large-scale Idol Singer groups are known for their longevity with their unique concept of rotating members, where older members "graduate" and new members are inducted as new "generations", as well as smaller-scale projects where select members perform and promote in groups known as "sub-units." The first Idol Singer group known for implementing this concept dates back to Onyanko Club in the 80s, and their successful formula has led to many other idol groups using this concept, including Morning Musume, AKB48, and NCT.
• The late Nineties and early Aughts saw a huge success of bubblegum dance music, especially thanks to Danish group Aqua. The most blatant Aqua clones were Toy-Box, another Danish project that followed their example to a T: the Soprano and Gravel dynamic of a chirpy tiny female singer and deep-voiced male singer, childish lyrics full of sexual innuendos, super colorful and intentionally cheesy videoclips, etc. The videos for their first successes "Tarzan and Jane" and "Best Friend" were obviously modeled after Aqua's "Doctor Jones" and "Barbie Girl" respectively.
• In the wake of Wendy Carlos' ground-breaking hit album Switched-On Bach, record companies would acquire Moog modular synths (the bigger, the better), get musicians who had a vague idea on how to handle such a machine and have them remake popular classical music with it, believing that this would be the next big fad in music. It wasn't.
• After ABBA won in 1974, a lot of entries in the Eurovision Song Contest for years afterward attempted to follow their lead. In particular the 1975 winner, "Ding Dinge Dong" was very much in the same mould. You can still see this trope at play in the ESC to this day: in any given year, there will always be a number of entries that blatantly ape the previous year's winner, though it hardly ever works.
• The success of Gloryhammer (an Affectionate Parody of European style Power Metal and Heavy Mithril) has led to a lot of bands copying their style to the point that it's argubly a genre by itself at this point. Notable examples include Victorius, Grailknights and Space Unicorn on Fire (Yes, that is their name). Even Dragonforce got in on the fun with their latest album
• When A Christmas Together by John Denver and The Muppets became a hit album in 1979, Disney responded the next year with Disney's Merry Christmas Carols, which similarly featured a Folk Music singer (Larry Groce) performing both serious and comical Christmas songs with a beloved ensemble of characters (Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and Goofy in particular), including many characters each singing a line in a rollicking take on "The Twelve Days of Christmas". The Disney album also included a children's chorus, one of whom—a young Molly Ringwald—even got a Step Up to the Microphone moment to sing an entire song.
• Bruce Springsteen's focus on older rock n' roll and themes about the working-class helped inspired a wave of popularity for Heartland Rock and Roots Rock. Acts like Tom Petty, John Mellencamp, and Bob Seger started gaining popularity or were helped along by Springsteen's rise. Although these acts weren't necessarily inspired by him, their shared similarities certainly helped.
• At first, G-Funk was just the specific production style of Dr. Dre, who favoured George Clinton samples but liked to have them replayed by live musicians due to his obsession with sound quality. Snoop Dogg's album Doggystyle, produced by Dre, has a track on it called "G-Funk", in which Snoop names the genre. Ice Cube then started making songs imitating Dre's style, and other rappers from the West Coast and beyond all began to copy it. By the late 90s, the G-Funk sound would be so ubiquitous that Spice Girls would be using slurry raps and portamento synths on their pop singles.
• Much of the criticism of Eminem's legacy in hip-hop is to do with this. He is one of the most respected and skilled emcees of all time, and has been an influence on many prominent artists like Jay-Z, Kendrick Lamar, Kanye West, Nicki Minaj, Ed Sheeran, Juice WRLD, Lana Del Rey, Tyler, the Creator, Danny Brown, Chance the Rapper and J. Cole, to name just a few. However, his position as the most visible white rapper has led to him having an outsized influence on white rappers, spawning a subgenre — sometimes called White Rap, although many of the artists within the genre are not white — who emulate Eminem's quick, aggressive and gimmicky style of rapping, his Card-Carrying Villain and confessional lyrics, and mockery of artists who don't use this aesthetic. It's worth pointing out that few, if any, of the rappers in this subgenre share Eminem's musicality, performance ability, or omnivorous love of hip-hop — many have admitted to only listening to Eminem, with the worst offenders not even going deeper than the records he made in The New '10s. Eminem himself has had mixed opinions about these rappers — while he has collaborated with and supported more respected members of the genre like Logic and Joyner Lucas, and shouted out Hopsin (one of few Eminem clones who tries to rip off his early style), he has also sneered at "honkies sounding like me", dismissed NF as "a Recovery clone of me", slapped at Macklemore for trying to be The Moral Substitute to him, and made Machine Gun Kelly the subject of the most commercially successful Diss Track of all time ("Killshot"). He's also collaborated with plenty of white rappers seen in opposition to the subgenre, such as Jack Harlow (who, incidentally, cites Eminem as an influence).

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