Artists hurt by a label change

And I mean commercially, not artistically, so R.E.M. is the wrong answer.

I was listening to Roy Orbison, and boy he crashed fast after jumping to MGM from Monument.

Another is the Beau Brummels, not that they had much choice, with Autumn folding. But Warner Brothers making them do that useless cover album cost them momentum. Triangle should have been a hit/spawned hits.

The Everly Brothers were never able to recapture the magic of the Cadence years, but I'm not sure that was WB's fault. A confluence of the British Invasion and a dispute with Archie Bleyer that stopped any new self penned songs for several years was probably more responsible for their commercial decline.

 

Maybe not commercially (though they had big hits on Warners) but artiscally they really soared.

I'd add Fats Domino on Paramount, Chuck Berry on Mercury, Ricky Nelson on Decca. And-- again only commercially-- the Beach Boys on Warners.

 

Kinks going from Arista to MCA.

Granted, they'd already started to slide, as 1984's "Word of Mouth" stalled at #57 after 4 straight top 15 albums in the US.

However, the Kinks went over the cliff when they went to MCA. "Think Visual" peaked at #81 and their other 2 MCA albums didn't even make the top 100...

 

Ringo Starr declined commercially when he left Apple.

After a #2 and a #8 album, his first on Atlantic - 1976's "Rotogravure" - peaked at #28.

Ringo then fell off a commercial cliff and never recovered...

 

Hall & Oates from RCA to Arista, although this was probably coincidental to them being past commercial peak.

 

In the 70s signing to Arista was like "going for a little ride".

 

Yeah, but Hall and Oates signed with Arista in the 80s!

Going to Arista in the 70s certainly worked well for the Kinks...

 

Bob Dylan going to Asylum...Planet Waves

It’s ok, but it’s not the Columbia albums that bracket it.

 

Neil Young at Geffen. Heck, it went so bad Geffen sued him.

 

Pentangle to Reprise in 1972. They were put on a shelf and forgotten!

 

Badfinger

 

H&O did have a big hit from each of their Arista albums though-- "Everything Your Heart Desires" (top 10) and "So Close" (top 20). True, both of those albums were creatively disappointing, but their career was hurt more by the long hiatus.

 

Yeah, that's the same as with the Kinks, probably. Even if the Kinks had stayed on Arista, they probably would've continued to decline commercially.

At least H&O didn't immediately fall off the cliff with Arista. "Ooh Yeah!" still made it to #24 and "Everything Your Heart Desires" got to #3.

Their subsequent albums flopped, though they still mustered a #11 single in 1990 with "So Close". That was their last gasp on the charts...

 

Cocteau Twins leaving 4AD.

 

Ha - we posted the same comments at the same time!

It's funny to think of the 3.5 years between "Big Bam Boom" and "Ooh Yeah!' as a "long hiatus", but I agree it felt that way at the time.

Their momentum was also probably hurt by Hall's disappointing results with his 1986 solo material...

 

Mary Wells when she left Motown and signed with 20th Century Fox in 1964, which was not without reason/justification: the royalty rate on the contract she'd signed at 17 wasn't not particularly favorable. But the big hits abruptly dried up.

 

Husker Du. Went to Warner - one album, split.

 

Madness leaving Stiff for Virgin

 

Marty Robbins from Columbia to Decca. Luckily he came back to CBS after being away only 3 years.

 

That too, but I was thinking of the one after the two Arista albums.

 

Oh - so you didn't mean the move from RCA to Arista?

I don't think any post-Arista label changes hurt them because they were already pretty much toast commercially anyway. They went from a #60 album in 1990 to a #95 in 1997 - a drop, obviously, but not a significant one given their prior heights.

Once they left the top 20, it was splitting hairs.

And yeah, they did have that last gasp #11 single in 1990, so I guess you could use that to argue they declined precipitously when they resurfaced in the late 90s, but I think they were already done...

 

Yeah, I don't even think of pre-Arista as a hiatus, since they kept on having hits from Bam Boom and the Apollo album. I remember a big launch for Ooh Yeah, so for a time things went on as usual. I would say they hung on for dear life with the Arista albums, and the next step was either a concentrated comeback or disappearing altogether.

 

The common thread through most of these moves is that the early-career successes that land artists those big second contracts get harder & harder to replicate. So it's usually more the nature of the pop-music beast than any problems with the new label as such.

As in professional sports, labels have often paid for past glories which were way, way back in the rearview mirror, never to return. That said, there's probably never been a record label contract as ridiculous as Albert Pujols' deal with baseball's LA Angels. Pujols is now 38 years old, and has a batting average of just .251 at this writing. Yet he'll earn approximately $100 million between now and the end of his contract in 2021, at which point he'll be 41 years old & unlikely to be a productive player — if he's playing at all.

 

Hurt by? We got a slew of great b-sides from the last two on Fontana + the Snow EP

 

I actually do view the period from "BBB" to "OY" as a "hiatus", partly because bands didn't usually go 3.5 years between studio albums back then.

Also, the fact Hall "went solo" in the meantime made this feel like a longer break than the chronology might claim.

Anecdotally, I think it felt like they were "old news" by 1988. They had a great run from 1980 to 1985 but they were already starting to fade somewhat with "BBB", as it wasn't as successful as its predecessors.

It just seemed like they were out of touch () with the pop climate by 1988...