Popular Bands Changing Their Style of Music Over Time
By Anlyon98
@Anlyon98 (36)
United States
April 1, 2012 9:01pm CST
Recently I've been taking an interest in bands: Green Day, Linkin Park, Matchbox Twenty,etc. I've been noticing with these type of bands that their music style changes over time, and I was wondering why that is. My thinking is that they do it for the fan base. Expanding your styles and ways of music, you get more fans that are into that style.
Linkin Park is a great example. I found Linkin Park because of their later work. I love the album Minutes to Midnight, and after taking a liking for their music, I decided to look up some of their early work. Man did I hate it!!! Many on here would probably disagree with me and say that they loved Linkin Park's early work, but their later stuff turned them off because of their change in style.
Taylor Swift is another example. Though she is just a solo artist and not a band her change in musical style expanded get fan base from just country music listeners to country music, ALONG with pop and mainstream music listeners.
So why do you think bands or solo artists change their style. Do you think it's for more fans, more popularity, or maybe just because they wanted to change their style and "image" shall I say. I'm hoping this will be a very interesting discussion.
1 response
@jjzone44 (917)
• United States
2 Apr 12
I think there are several reasons that a band might evolve their style, and probably their agents have something to do with it as well. More fans equals more popularity, so those are kind of the same. Sometimes the person who initially formed the band had a certain style or genre in mind when they did it, and someone who is in the band may have influence and talent in another style. This may have started with ballads; pretty much any hard rock group has a ballad or two that they are known for.
It used to be that you had to wait for sales and radio play rankings to come out in print on a weekly or monthly basis, but with the Internet you can gauge the popularity of a particular piece of music almost instantly. If a video of one type of song generates say 500 hits an hour, but a ballad generates 750, then the agents and the band kind of know which piece is more popular at the moment.
Some too do it for image, maybe they started out in a certain area, but their focus was always to get to a different genre of music. And there are those artists that simply did not do all that well in the genre they first chose, so they change out of necessity.
