Fans Move On but Miss Out

These are uncertain times in pop music. Between rapid-fire changes in technology and dramatic shifts in listening habits, we aren’t sure how we’ll get music in the future, or how much we’re going to want. Increasing evidence suggests that a new generation of listeners, able to download music at will from the Internet, is far more interested in individual songs than complete albums.

This trend has record executives alarmed about the staying power of artists. In Calendar’s recent survey of 22 industry decision-makers, fan loyalty was seen as being as outdated as eight-tracks. “It’s a sad time,” one label head said. “If you get past two hit albums, three at the outside, it doesn’t matter how much integrity or credibility an artist has built up, sales are going to fall.”

One reason this is so unsettling is that everyone operated for years under the assumption that quality artists were immune to the fickleness of pop tastes. There was even a smug satisfaction in the notion that mediocre bestsellers would be short-lived.

It was easy in the mid-’90s to predict the quick decline of Hootie & the Blowfish, a band so ordinary that its appeal remains a mystery to most in the music business. And sure enough, its sales dropped some 75% in the U.S.--from the 9.9 million of “Cracked Rear View” in 1994 to the 2.3 million of “Fairweather Johnson” just two years later. The group’s third studio collection, 1998’s “Musical Chairs,” fell another 65% to 799,000.

But now even our best artists are subject to the same humiliating rejection. Alanis Morissette’s “Jagged Little Pill” was one of the most acclaimed albums of the ‘90s, a look at romantic anxiety and the search for self-esteem that struck such a strong chord among pop-rock fans that it became one of the two best-selling albums ever by a female artist--with more than 13.8 million sold.

Morissette’s follow-up, “Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie,” was a more difficult work that examined life’s challenges and rewards with a primal-scream intensity reminiscent of the honesty of John Lennon’s early solo work.

With its more complex edges, the album didn’t figure to match “Jagged Little Pill,” but there were enough accessible highlights --including the disarming “Thank U” and the uplifting “Would Not Come”--that it should have been a blockbuster. Instead, sales fell almost 85% to 2.2 million.

The fear in the industry is that major labels, under fierce pressure to produce winning quarterly figures, will be forced to look for artists with immediate sales potential rather than focus on the development of quality career artists. At the same time, labels may cut loose performers they feel are on the downside of the curve.

The danger in all this is that young record buyers begin thinking all artists are disposable. It’s easy to fall into that trap, which can be fostered by media reports of declining sales and by an artist’s decreasing presence on trend-conscious MTV and radio stations.

What younger fans may not yet realize is that some of the most compelling albums have been made long after an artist’s best-selling work.

Consider Neil Young, whose career is a textbook example of the rewards of sticking with a great artist, regardless of his chart position in a given year.

If you look only at the charts, “After the Gold Rush” in 1970 and “Harvest” in 1972 are Young’s most successful albums. Both are double platinum or more (2 million copies shipped)--and both are excellent, accessible works.

But Young’s most penetrating album of the ‘70s came three years after “Harvest,” though it didn’t even go gold (500,000 copies shipped). “Tonight’s the Night” was a dark, disillusioned work recorded after the drug-related deaths of two of Young’s friends. It was too dark for radio programmers and, apparently, for many of the fans of his gentler, early works.

Young has never regained the full commercial punch of “Harvest,” but he has had platinum albums since then, and he gave us in recent years five of the strongest back-to-back albums ever in rock--”Freedom,” “Ragged Glory,” “Harvest Moon,” “Sleeps With Angels” and “Mirror Ball.”

Bob Dylan is another vivid example. He made his biggest impact on the pop charts in the mid-’60s, when such singles as “Like a Rolling Stone” and “Positively 4th Street” made it into the Top 10. Though he hasn’t returned to the Top 10 with a single, Dylan has rewarded his core fan base with such excellent albums as “Blood on the Tracks” (1974), “Slow Train Coming” (1979) and the Grammy-winning “Time Out of Mind” (1998).

Lennon also did some of his best work after the spotlight of the Beatles. His first solo album, “The Plastic Ono Band” in 1970, only went gold (500,000 shipped), but it is a bold, soul-searching collection that is widely hailed as one of the best and most uncompromising albums ever made. When reflecting recently on Lennon’s influence, U2’s Bono said it was the Beatles who “wrote the book on tunes,” but it was Lennon in “Plastic Ono Band” that wrote the book on “revealing your soul.”More recently, Pearl Jam is a band whose music has grown in maturity and craft as its sales have declined. There was a winning sense of youthful urgency to some of the songs in its first two albums, which sold some 15 million copies collectively in the U.S. alone. But the quintet showed more range and character in the next four albums--even though the sales of those albums fell from 4.6 million for 1994’s “Vitalogy” to about 700,000 for last year’s “Binaural.”

The long list of contemporary artists who have given us marvelous music despite being in and out of commercial favor ranges from U2 and R.E.M. to Emmylou Harris and Bruce Springsteen. And don’t forget Randy Newman and Tom Waits, or Public Enemy and Steve Earle, or Merle Haggard or Elvis Costello or Aretha Franklin or Lyle Lovett or Al Green, among so many.

My suspicion is that such ‘90s arrivals as Moby, Radiohead, Beck, Lauryn Hill, Grandaddy, PJ Harvey, Travis, Shelby Lynne, D’Angelo, Meshell Ndegeocello and--yes--Morissette are going to continue to enrich us in similar ways.

One encouraging sign in this regard is what is happening with Pearl Jam. As album sales declined, Pearl Jam has been written off by many in the record industry, but the quality of the music remains so strong that the band continues to be a potent box-office draw. The band’s hard-core fan base recognizes the continued relevancy and power of the group.

Given all the truly disposable pop in the marketplace today, however, it’s no wonder many young people feel the need to move on to something new each year. But great talents are too rare to let go when they finally do surface. One of the joys of pop is finding acts that speak so personally and profoundly to you that they remain an essential part of your life--even if you have to follow them from label to label, including a move from major labels to indies.

That kind of deep relationship is at the heart of the pop experience and today’s young fans shouldn’t let technology or mainstream buying habits blind them to its joys.

*

Robert Hilburn, The Times’ pop music critic, can be reached at robert.hilburn@latimes.com.