Every huge artist has their "New Jersey" - a huge event album that ultimately feels a bit hollow & signals a career decline

Tbf, Keep the Faith was also a multiplatinum album that reached #1 in several countries and had three hit singles. If there has been an appreciable commercial decline post-[i[1989[/i], which sales figures might suggest, the concept might still apply as well as something like this can. I just don't think 1989 would be the NJ.

Except that Reputation kind of landed with a thud upon release, as opposed to feeling more hollow upon repeated listens.

That's subjective - I loved it upon release (I think it's a stronger album than 1989), and with time it's come to feel one of the artistic peaks of her catalog. To me, anyway

(If she didn't "pivot" w/Folklore, I assume Lover would have been her NJ? – splashy but bad lead single; a lot of buzz, but few awards; etc.)

Reactions to Bon Jovi albums were objective otoh.

I thought the idea here was nailing down objective criteria, otherwise what's the point. If someone on here says Purple Rain felt a bit hollow, that's Prince's New Jersey, who can argue?

P much everything in the OP is subjective.

I am 50 and "folklore" was the first Taylor Swift album for which I was aware thanks to media coverage that it was about to come out, the first one I listened to immediately on release, and the first one I've repeatedly listened to all the way through. ("evermore" was the second, for all three.) So from my perspective, as someone who doesn't listen to a ton of chart radio, 2020 was the FIRST time Swift had such a level of media saturation that it reached my eye/ear. (Of course I know "Shake It Off" like everybody else but could not have told you what album it's on.)

My kids and my wife and I are all into it and play it a lot.

If someone on here says Purple Rain felt a bit hollow, that's Prince's New Jersey, who can argue?

Judging from my attempts to make "Automatic For the People is R.E.M.'s New Jersey" happen, a lot of people!

I would vote for NAIHF, but I’m sure it’s been discussed ad nauseum ITT!

I would have said it was obvious it was Monster!

Like, the idea that there's some kind of objective universal rule that can be derived from Bon Jovi's 1988 album New Jersey (which I would probably rate as highly as Slippery When Wet fwiw) is more absurd than people talking about albums that felt a bit hollow to them.

I don’t think it’s a crazy statement that the biggest global artists of 2010-2012 (Swift, Kanye, Beyonce, Perry) have a lower profile ten years later?

I mean the way fame works now is different than in the hair metal days - filter bubbles creating a more loyal fanbase, longer career arcs because marketeers know better how artists can tailor their output better to a maturing fanbase, etc.

OK but Taylor is still gaining new fans, as evidenced by the anecdotes above; I don't think the same is true for Kanye or (maybe) Katy Perry. I think Taylor (and Beyoncé) remain as central to music/culture as it's possible for a long-term artist to be these days.

who is Googling these artist names in 2021, anyway

― r u rolling pop 2021 (morrisp), Tuesday, July 6, 2021 10:26 AM bookmarkflaglink

OMG GOOGLE FOR "TAYLOR" AND FIND NEW JERSEY

You would think Perry's audience had definitely shrunk, but she's still pulling almost 37 mil. monthly listeners on Spotify, her most recent single is doing decent-ish business there (18 mil. spins after six weeks), and her biggest late-model single, "Never Really Over", has racked up higher #s than some of her earlier, theoretically bigger hits.

Yeah I don't know much about her tbh

The latest revive is this thread’s New Jersey.

you can’t really use streaming numbers to straight up compare old songs with newer tracks. Spotify wasn’t nearly as prevalent during Perry’s heyday as it is now.
YouTube views are a more honest metric (but here also, older songs are negatively impacted by things like changes in official artist accounts -
see the relatively low numbers for her first megahits)

for example:
streaming-wise, a recent hit like “Never Really Over” appears to be in a similar league as older blockbusters like “Dark Horse”, “Roar” and “Firework”: 514M vs 803M, 656M and 551M total streams, respectively.

now let’s look at the corresponding YouTube views: “Never Really Over” 142M, decent, you might say, but “Dark Horse” has 3.097M (almost 22x as much), “Roar” 3.380M (almost 24x as much), and even “Firework”, the oldest of this bunch, has 1.317M views in the version currently on YT (9x as much), but actually misses a billion or two (or more), I suspect.

the fact that Perry’s top 10 most streamed songs on Spotify is dominated by older hits does tell you another thing tho: that she has m/l become a “heritage” act - for contrast, look at someone like Justin Bieber: his Spotify top 10 is dominated by his current & recent stuff (“Love Yourself” is the oldest track here, the only one from the Purpose era, which in itself is much more recent than most of the big songs in KPs top 10)

still, I don’t think KP had a New Jersey - PRISM was a simply a big ol’ flop after two hugely successful albums, and she hasn’t recovered from it since.

sorry, biting myself in the ass there. PRISM is the one with “Roar” and “Dark Horse”, follow-up Witness is the one that severely underperformed - but that came as quite a surprise, don’t think most people had already gauged that the gig was up

"I don’t think it’s a crazy statement that the biggest global artists of 2010-2012 (Swift, Kanye, Beyonce, Perry) have a lower profile ten years later?"

Not a weird statement at all (though I'd certainly disagree in most cases with your picks), but, important to remember that not all declines in popularity = a New Jersey... which is what we're talking about here.

YouTube views are a more honest metric (but here also, older songs are negatively impacted by things like changes in official artist accounts -
see the relatively low numbers for her first megahits)

disagree; the scale of # of youtube users between 2010 and now is massive (hundreds of millions > billions)

The latest revive is this thread’s New Jersey.

Every huge message board has its "New Jersey" - a huge event thread that ultimately feels a bit hollow & signals a career decline

what I said is that it's a fairer means of comparing the popularity of older and newer hits of someone like Katy Perry - where the discrepancy is much smaller on YouTube than on Spotify, as the examples I gave you show

"but that came as quite a surprise, don’t think most people had already gauged that the gig was up"

Is it too early to declare Katy Perry's Prism a New Jersey?

― J. Sam, Thursday, May 22, 2014 2:29 PM (seven years ago) bookmarkflaglink

katy perry otm

― i also enjoy in line skateing (spazzmatazz), Thursday, May 22, 2014 2:31 PM (seven years ago) bookmarkflaglink

Prism was kind of a bomb: it ultimately only sold 1/4 of what Teenage Dream did, and produced only two #1 singles after everything from the prior set went Top 3.

And then Witness fell off a cliff.

the other problem with streaming is i think Katy Perry has a lot of FB friends and she's msging them each morning to bump her trax but the ~media~ isn't talkin about this

The biggest threads from 2010-2012 have now become heritage threads.

Going back a bit, I had actually started a post about how KP definitely had a shrunken audience and is perhaps now more known for American Idol before I thought to check Spotify only to see that: (A) Her audience is larger than I expected, and (B) It's not (entirely) all about her back catalogue.

sorry, biting myself in the ass there. PRISM is the one with “Roar” and “Dark Horse”, follow-up Witness is the one that severely underperformed - but that came as quite a surprise, don’t think most people had already gauged that the gig was up

You are describing almost to a T the opening post’s definition of an album that qualifies

After two decades of this thread we've finally found a second new jersey.

okay, New Jersey it is then, I should have known better than to venture there anyway, just came here to refute, once and data-driven for all, the notion that Katy is somehow still as popular/successful as she was up to and including “Roar”.

xp

or “Dark Horse” rather - could have sworn that one came before “Roar”, but it didn’t

Apropos of nothing, but it seems now that one of the truest death rattles of physical media was seeing tons of unsold Witness CDs clogging shelves in the summer of '17.

what I said is that it's a fairer means of comparing the popularity of older and newer hits of someone like Katy Perry - where the discrepancy is much smaller on YouTube than on Spotify, as the examples I gave you show

― ten man poland chasing this means hamsik feasts (breastcrawl), Tuesday, July 6, 2021 1:11 PM (fifty-two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

not really arguing with your overall point, just suggesting that even if it is, relative to spotify, a better indicator, it's really not an ideal one.

Katy Perry somehow has more Twitter followers than almost anyone mentioned here (except for Bieber)

her empire knows no bounds

You would think Perry's audience had definitely shrunk, but she's still pulling almost 37 mil. monthly listeners on Spotify

Bon Jovi themselves have over 19M (just under GnR at 20M, well over Poison at 4M), which seems not bad, considering their comparative age.

"but that came as quite a surprise, don’t think most people had already gauged that the gig was up"

Is it too early to declare Katy Perry's Prism a New Jersey?

― J. Sam, Thursday, May 22, 2014 2:29 PM (seven years ago) bookmarkflaglink

katy perry otm

― i also enjoy in line skateing (spazzmatazz), Thursday, May 22, 2014 2:31 PM (seven years ago) bookmarkflaglink

― Muswell Hillbilly Elegy (President Keyes), Tuesday, July 6, 2021 2:28 PM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

SWISH

Actually that should be

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGk5fR-t5AU

Culture II feels like a classic New Jersey at this point

With all the clickfarms, AI bots and payola around streaming/social media it’s getting really hard to asses popularity/cultural relevance with actual humans. Someone with a million followers could have 100k, 10k or 1k real people as fans, nobody knows. Someone with 100M streams on Spotify could have 50M real clicks to play the song by actual people, or could just have paid to have Spotify inject the song 99M times into Discover playlists.

You could fall back to ‘real cash spent’ on tickets & collectibles but that overestimates the popularity of artists that have found a way to extract huge sums out of a small following of old & wealthy superfans vs artists where a billion real kids click on a spotify/youtube/tiktok link that yields the artist $3.50.

Maybe it’s all about counting artist t-shirts when walking through town.

"Culture II feels like a classic New Jersey at this point"

100%

"Maybe it’s all about counting artist t-shirts when walking through town."

That actually doesn't seem like a bad metric! Like, wearing a Migos t-shirt in 2017 pre-Culture II would be a very different thing than wearing one in 2021. Maybe "one should feel faintly embarrassed to wear the artist's merch" should be part of the definition...

On reflection, though, what WERE the expectations of Bon Jovi in 1989? Did even their most fervent fans think that they were going to suddenly turn into Springsteen, U2 or Metallica? I was 14 in 1986 and Bon Jovi already seemed pretty hollow to me at their height, and I even read their Rolling Stone cover story.
I was also thinking that, as a listener ages, they realize that decline in quality is almost inevitable past a certain point in an artist's career, so their expectations change.

Sidebar: The New Jersey of NFTs

why are these sentences i have to read pic.twitter.com/ocIxIhVLlf

— Laura Hudson (@laura_hudson) July 6, 2021

the fact that people are unironically discussing Migos in a t-shirt context clearly demonstrates how far the mighty have fallen

anyway, enjoy your entirely wholesome New Jersey buffet, folx!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPI-mRFEIH0

I was also thinking that, as a listener ages, they realize that decline in quality is almost inevitable past a certain point in an artist's career, so their expectations change.