Have you ever wondered why great musicians can’t keep cranking out hits every year? Consider Neal Diamond, for example. He wrote and recorded some of the greatest songs ever. But then the hits stopped coming, despite the fact that his talent probably improved with experience.
He’s not alone. That’s the normal pattern. Most musicians have their time, and then it’s over. How do you explain it?
Lots of great artists such as the Rolling Stones continue to draw huge crowds. But they don’t produce number one hits anymore. And the most popular songs in their concerts are the hits from the past. Do the Rolling Stones have less talent than they did when they were in their twenties? It seems unlikely.
One explanation is that the public’s musical tastes change while the musicians stay the same. But the drop-off in popularity always seems too abrupt for that explanation.
Another explanation is that the musicians stop taking drugs and their creativity dries up. But that doesn’t explain all the musicians who never took drugs, or never stopped.
There’s also a hungriness factor. Before the musicians hit it big, they have more motivation and fewer distractions. That probably counts for some of it. But you’d expect their experience to compensate.
Some of it is surely because youth can connect with youth better than geriatrics can connect with youth. But getting old is gradual, and the drop-off in appeal is sudden.
I think I discovered the main problem several years ago when I experimented with introducing a new comic strip called Plop. Dilbert was already a big success, but it had one built-in disadvantage: It didn’t appeal to smaller kids. And if you want to build a licensing phenomenon, like Peanuts, or Garfield, you need a comic that kids love and adults enjoy too.
The formula for mega-comics is pretty simple. To appeal to kids, the main character has to be a kid or an animal. Adults can relate to kids and animals too. It’s that simple. And the best solution of all is a comic featuring a kid – usually a boy – WITH an animal, e.g. Calvin and Hobbes, Charlie Brown and Snoopy, Dennis and Ruff, and Winnie the Pooh and Christopher Robbin.
I knew how to be funny. I knew how to draw a comic. All I needed was a kid with a cute pet. So I drew a few dozen comics about a hairless Elbonian kid with a cute, talking, pet pig. In Elbonia, every man, baby, and woman has a full beard. Plop (named after the sound he made when his mother gave birth to him in the muddy outdoors) was hairless, and therefore an oddball. That was the heart of it. How could it miss?
I published the samples on Dilbert.com and asked for feedback. Some people liked it a lot, but most people compared it to Dilbert – a comic I had refined for 10 years by that point – and decided I was “going downhill.”
In other words, I was competing with MYSELF, and losing. The public doesn’t remember that Dilbert improved considerably with age. New comics rarely come out of the starting block at their full force. (Calvin and Hobbes and Garfield are notable exceptions.) More commonly, as with Peanuts, The Far Side, and Dilbert, the cartoonist finds his voice and style and audience over time.
So while I had the ability to create a comic that was (in my opinion) better than other brand new comics, I would never enjoy the benefits of that comparison. I would be compared to Dilbert. And because Plop was not as developed as Dilbert, it would look like a huge step backwards. Indeed, the majority of the comments were “not as funny as Dilbert.” So I dropped the project.
Musicians have the same obstacle. They can do more of the same sound, and consumers will think it sounds too much like the last album. Or they can try something different, and be unfavorably compared to their own hits. The public won’t be patient while the musician develops the new sound. It’s an almost impossible challenge.
Madonna – who reportedly has a genius I.Q. – continually “reinvents” herself. If Madonna puts out a new album today, what the hell would you compare it to? Everything she does is pretty different. That formula works for her, but it’s a tough plan to copy.