In the 50 years between 1955 and 2005, 47.5% of artists who had a song make the sales charts never made it again. HighSnobiety looks at the reasons why.
Via Aleks Eror:
This information comes courtesy of Storm Gloor, an assistant professor at the University of Colorado in Denver, who trawled through a full 50 years of the US Billboard Charts, punching numbers into a calculator to come up with this figure.
Of the 5745 artists who thought that they had realized a childhood dream by releasing a hit record, for 2732 of them, this would be nothing more than a false dawn.
Although tragic, this doesn’t necessarily mean that they would be denied a lifetime of fame. Take Vanilla Ice as an example: 1990’s “Ice Ice Baby” was his one and only hit, yet he has endured for nearly three decades as a regular pop cultural reference, the punchline of many jokes about shitty white boy rap, and he even appeared in season 23 of Dancing with the Stars. If you turn your nose up at this then I am really curious to hear what you have done with your life that’s so great.
• Why Do So Many Musicians End up Being One-Hit Wonders? (HighSnobiety)