How to survive a flop

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1:00status it deserves at indeed.com-slave-podcast. Just go to indeed.com-slave-podcast right now and support our show by saying you heard about indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com-slave-podcast. Terms and conditions applied. Need to hire? This is a job for indeed sponsored jobs. How do you go from having a billion streams, number one, to 3,000 copies and nobody knows about the album? When you go as high as Liza went, it's only natural that there's going to be a time when you come down from that. There is no sugar coating it. Katy Perry's new musical era has been a flop. Is it just me or does it feel like a lot of music artists are in their flop era? Think about it. Nothing was the same since Kendrick knocked out Drake. I'm embarrassing.

2:01Katy Perry, not really giving fireworks right now. They ask you how you are. You just have to say that you're fine when you're not really fine, but you just can't get into it because they would never understand. And there was one point in time where I couldn't step foot in a workout class without hearing Liza. What's up, Peloton? It's Liza. Get on your bike because I'm definitely online. But her latest album made no noise. I hurt my own feelings and I was really stressed and I was really sad because I was just was like, wait a minute. This is like some of my best stuff. I'm John Guinhill and this week on Explanant To Me from Vox, what can we all learn from those failures? Why is it so hard to strike gold twice? Essentially, what the flop is going on? I think it's mostly about ambition, not meeting reality. That's Spencer Cornhaber. He writes about music and pop culture at the Atlantic. It's when someone sets out to do something with sort of grand goals, whether that's have

3:03hits like a pop star is supposed to have or even connect with the same fan base that listened to your last album as an indie artist. It creates the conditions where the public might notice that you didn't meet those goals, especially if you're kind of open about them. And when there's a disconnect, that's when the effort starts coming around. Is this new? Have we always talked about stardom this way or is this, I don't know, stand brain taking over for all of us? Stand brain is taking over for all of us, but the idea of a flop is one of the oldest storylines or tropes in entertainment history and Hollywood. It could refer to silent movie stars when Hollywood made the turns to talkies and suddenly this whole generation of icons looked washed up. There's nothing you could have done differently. There's nothing you can do. Your time has run out. It used to be in silent pictures, it used to be big. I am big. It's the pictures that got small. It could refer to the Bee Gees.

4:08After the public turned on disco and all of a sudden their music isn't selling like it used to. Orkin referred to someone like Lizzo who suddenly puts on an album and realizes it isn't the, you know, Osso woke 2010s anymore. Why are we all flopping around right now? I think that something is going on where the machinery of popularity has changed under our feet and we don't really know why or what it means. You know, it was about 10 years ago that TikTok came on the scene and really upended the entire internet attention economy. Like immediately as soon as you open up the app it's like, gotcha, here's another one, here's another one, next to you know an hour's gone by and you've wasted it. No wonder the hugely popular social media app has more than a billion uses. And created a world where short-form videos, memes, you know quirky jokes, lots of personality,

5:12facial tics, catchphrases. These were sort of the coin of the realm and drove what popularity was for a long time. And I'm not exactly sure what's going on but to me it feels like a lot of that landscape is starting to become stale, crusty, old, janky. People don't really know how to work its levers in a way that once did. And so a lot of artists and entertainers and public figures who once seemed like bankable commodities are starting to seem less reliable. You know it used to be that if someone caused their fans to go out and buy their new single at the store, those sales would be totaled and we would have a very clear sense of how popular that single was in relation to other things that were on sale that week. Now it's more about how often something is listened to on Spotify or for how long someone listens to it. And it's all these different kind of metrics that aren't even always measuring what you

6:12might think of as traditional popularity. So I'm not very high streaming numbers because they put out a lot of short songs that their fans all listen to over and over again, even if another artist has a larger fan base that would kind of traditionally mean that they're more broadly popular. So it's created this sort of confusion about what popularity even means. Why does it seem like one bad movie or one bad album can end a career now? Was there once more room for artists to fail? I don't want to be too romantic about how things used to be. We all know that the tabloids and media critics of previous decades, whether that's the 2000s, the 90s, the 30s, were quite vicious, quite gleeful about the failures of famous people. We all know how much downfalls can be glorified. We all know how much shot and freedom runs our culture. I don't think any of that is new. I think that there's just this feeling like their failure is our failure.

7:14There's been a collapsing between the sort of normal civilian individual and the celebrity. That's partly because we all live our lives online and on social media, we have to curate our image and think about how we're coming across the strangers who will never meet in a way that people not too long ago would have found totally weird. So let's put us in this sort of celebrity mindset where we all have arcs and narratives and brands. We see how many people commented on our latest Instagram post, how many likes we got. So I think there's almost an odd empathy for celebrities when they flop now. Is it possible for a flop to be good for an artist? I think 100% of flop era can set up a really fun redemption arc for an artist. And we've seen a lot of them lately. Madonna just put out this album Confessions 2 that fans are saying is her best album in decades. And it's sort of, you can tell listening to it that comes from a desire to sort of

8:15claim something that a lot of people felt like she lost, which is the sense of owning the dance floor. And so that was kind of like a flop to heroism story that has made for some really fun music. I'd also point to someone like the artist later. She's like this pop singer who all of my friends are obsessed with right now. She put out this really crazy, noisy album that is just finally starting to break through and rack up some chart numbers for her after years of trying. And she said that she recorded it when she was kind of at the end of her rope and about to quit the music industry because she put out a couple albums that were flops. And it kind of creatively freed her up to kind of do what pleased her. I think that hope springs eternal in a way that maybe didn't exist before. And so for an artist like Lizzo, I would bet money that she's taking notes.

9:16She's thinking very hard and she's plotting her comeback and I wouldn't necessarily bet against her. Okay, so it is possible to claw your way back from a flop. But how do you avoid one in the first place? That's next. Talk for the show comes from talk, Iatry. If you've been looking into mental health support, therapy can definitely help. But sometimes it's not the whole answer. Psychiatric care is a whole other side of the mental health equation, but the process of getting that care isn't always clear or easy. That's why talk, Iatry exists. Talk, Iatry is a 100% online psychiatry practice that provides comprehensive evaluations, diagnoses, and ongoing medication management for conditions like ADHD, anxiety, depression,

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12:22I'm JQ. Back with more, explain it to me. My name is Tom Bryan and I am the executive editor at StereoGum, the music website. You have spent years studying the songs that reach number one on the Billboard charts. Yes, ma'am. So, what makes a song not succeed? So the whole idea of a flop is relative, right? There's a million songs on Spotify that nobody will ever hear. Those songs are not necessarily flops because they did not necessarily come with expectations when a major artist, someone who is expected to succeed, comes out and does not reach whatever benchmark that they or their fans or their label expect for them. Then it can be embarrassing and the internet being what it is. People love to seize upon that embarrassment and take off running with it. Are the songs that flop bad? Is that why they're floppin'? In some cases, yeah. You can definitely pick out a few and be like, oh, that wasn't the one.

13:25A lot of it is just timing and luck. And sometimes an artist comes along at the exact right moment and builds up good will and puts out the right song for them in that time. And then sometimes they misread the room in sort of howlingly, clangingly obvious ways and they end up not doing well. You know, it happens. It's happened to plenty of great people, plenty of stars of bounce back from having flops, but it does happen. Yeah, what are some really good songs that have flopped? Oh, well, geez. I guess as an online indie music critic, my sort of prototypical example is Emotion by Parley Gray-Jepson, not the song The Whole Out. But I need to tell you something. I really, really, really, really, really like you. She had had this gigantic global breakout smash with the song Call Me Maybe. But here's my lover. So call me Maybe. And then the album that she put out after this is this like brilliant, layered, excellent pop

14:28record that became, I would say, influential upon the idea that you could be a pop star who was a cult artist, like an indie rock band or an underground rapper or something, but it didn't sell. It didn't do numbers. And so in its moment, it was a critically beloved flop. It's crazy. How much of becoming a hit is about the music itself and how much of it, if you can even measure that, is about stuff like virality, marketing. Well, those things, they're so bound up with each other. And so, you know, especially a lot of time artists are making songs that are somehow engineered to go viral or they're making songs that comment on their own public perception and in effect, market themselves. And so when something like Lizzo comes along and puts out a record that doesn't do well, it becomes a bigger story than just, oh, people weren't feeling this song. It becomes like, oh, people don't like this person or this person has run out of their

15:32goodwill or whatever. And because like a Lizzo song, you hear her for some jumping through the speaker, whether the song does well or not. So the song and the artist become inexplicable from each other, the song and the marketing become inexplicable. There is another example of an artist who has gone from really high highs to very low flops that I would love to get into. And that's Katie Perry. I feel like we've come a long way from left shark at the Super Bowl. Like what happened there? Katie Perry has had the career that pop stars used to have, where they have a crazy dominant stretch, where they're knocking out hit after hit after hit and they're unstoppable. According to Billboard, Perry is the first woman and second artist ever into 53 year history of the hot 100 to have five songs from one album hit number one on the chart. Katie Perry sure has something to roar about.

16:34The new song is officially her eighth number one single. And then everything kind of tails off over time and one album has five number one hits. Next album has two number one hits. Next has no significant hits at all, but like a couple of top 10s. And it goes like that. You know, she put out an album right in the beginning of the pandemic. And so you can say, well, that one didn't do well. And that's not her fault. And then she spent a long time on American Idol as a judge. She spent a long time playing Las Vegas residencies. And then she was like, that's it. I'm putting American Idol on coming back. I'm being the pop star that you all want me to be. And she did a couple of things. She made a bad album. There's one thing. She also reunited with Dr. Luke, who was the co-writer and producer of lots of her big hits, but who in the times and she stopped working with them, you know, all this unsavory stuff about him accusations were made. Kesha, who was friends with Katy Perry when she came up, was the person making those accusations. And so it's for her to get back with him while bringing this message of like, it's a woman's

17:38world, something like that was the elite single. Oh, yeah. Sexy, confident. Yeah, I remember. Yeah. So that's how a song goes from being a bad song to just a notorious flop. And not only does the song not perform, it doesn't get radio, where playing streams and all that stuff. It actually like burns up a lot of the goodwill that this person has had. And it happens. Wow. Do you ever feel like a plastic bag floating in the wind? Yeah, we all do. That's the power of it. Are there examples of songs that critics may be hated initially and then over time? It's like, oh, this is actually a classic. So many. The songs that were hits and were universally regarded as irritating in their time, they have a great hit rate. You know, people were annoyed by, mmm, Bob, by Hanson. For want to be like the spice girls.

18:41I want to, I want to, I want to, I want to really, really do. I want to say, is it? It's so good. Yeah. It's such a fantastic, like, oboe. I was the beat if you want to go. Like they were, I would say widely regarded as a punchline. And now that is just an impeccable, beautiful, influential pop catalog. Like a song like The Quad CD DJs come on and ride it, the train. Like that's a, that's not a song. The critics were really lining up to praise in the, in the 1990s. But as a person who was a child, then I can tell you that song goes so hard and like, never stop going on. Oh, my God. You talk about middle school, dad, like even when I was growing, you said, we're all gonna for a tutu. Get your hands on my shoulders. We are making a train around this gym. Absolutely. How do artists tend to respond if they've entered a flop era?

19:43Well, there's, there's a grand, beautiful history of artists you'd want to hit wonders are people who, who never quite connected for whatever reason, who instead of trying the same thing over and over again, they become behind the scenes figures. They write songs for other people. Are they produce, are they become managers? Max Martin, who is now a head of John Lennon, but behind Ploma Cardi in terms of like song writers with number one hits, like the sheer number of them. Like he was the lead singer for a Swedish band in the 80s that was trying to be Bon Jovian and they never caught on. I didn't know that. Oh, yeah. His band was called It's Alive. You can look their songs up online. They're not that great, but he wound up making all these incredible records with all these different people. There's a lot of that that has happened many, many times throughout pop history that it is certainly one way to deal with the flop problem.

20:51Coming up, we talk with an artist who found a new way to make a head record. Support for the show comes from 11 Labs. Life is pain, says 11 Labs. Or that's what you might think when you're in a lengthy customer service called No Ending Site. Well, 11 Labs says they have a solution. It's called 11 Agents. 11 Agents is a platform for AI Voice and Chat Agents that can actually listen, understand, and resolve customer issues, they say. For instance, they can look up your account process requests and hand off to a person when needed. 11 Agents helps create better experiences for customers. They say while letting call centers and support teams focus on the issues that need personal touch. It's built for enterprise scale 2. 11 Agents handles more than 10 million conversations per week with SOC 2, HIPAA, and PCI

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23:58I'm J.Q. My name is Dan Wilson. I'm a singer and a songwriter and record producer. When people hear your name, there's probably one song in particular they think of. What is it? I guess it's probably closing time by my band, Sammy Sonic. Take me back to when the song came out. How did it come about and what was the response like? My wife and I were expecting our first child and I was at the same time kind of writing songs for a new Sammy Sonic album and that was one of about 60 songs that I wrote to show the guys, John and Jake. And I had gotten the impression from the guys in the band that no, this was not going to be the Dan becomes a dad album. So I kind of covertly wrote closing time.

25:02About four lines of into writing it, I was like, oh, this kind of sounds like it's about bar time but also being born. And we finally recorded it. It was so kind of blazingly exciting to listen to that it had sort of for us kind of risen to the top of the pop. I know who I want to take me home. I know who I want to take me home. Pretty soon a whole bunch of crazy stuff happened. We had got out to K-Rock in LA and that started this kind of domino effect of all the radio stations in the country playing it. Yeah, and then it sort of took on this crazy life that strangely has not faded. It's still happening. Is that the song that you want to be known for?

26:08How does it feel that that kind of is the signature song? I mean, awesome. I think it's a great song. When I listen to closing time, I just hear me and all my intentions and flaws and strength and whatever. But I actually, like, some things that I've written with other people, I've felt more, like I feel like when I listen to someone like you that I did with Adele, I feel like there's a song that feels like a kind of a songwriting trademark or like calling card or whatever. And I think there's something more gratifying to write something that someone else covers and then you can hear it and have an experience that's not connected to your own, like ego and self-image and so on. How did that transition come about? Because I think for some people having the big hit song, being the one singing it, having

27:10your face out there, that is the ultimate success. And you're very successful, but it maybe looks different from what people would imagine that looks like. Well, let's say if everything had gone according to plan in life, I probably would have kept being on tour and kept making semi-sonic records. But the child that we had whose arrival is kind of part of closing time, Coco was very, very sick for several years. She was in the hospital for 11 months after she was born. That suddenly made it real hard for me to be away 200 nights a year. I think I decided that I needed to re-invent myself, re-shape my life so that I could be home more with my family. How did you figure out the way to do that reinvention?

28:11One of my earliest musical influences, I guess you'd say, although I didn't think about as an influence when I was eight, but my parents listened to Carol King all the time. And Carol King, I figured out that she was the person who had written a bunch of other songs that I heard on the radio that she didn't sing. You make me feel, you make me feel, you make me feel like a natural woman. I think I figured out early that like, oh, there's this whole other thing to write songs for other people. And Carol seemed to be almost like the gold standard of that kind of person, like very collaborative, but also had her own recording career. And I always tried to collaborate with people. And I stopped touring with Semisonic. Being a writer for other people was already a big part of my musical dream.

29:12So it wasn't exactly a pivot. It was more like writing songs that could bring other people the kind of crazy experiences that closing time brought me and John and Jake. It's kind of fun to be able to think, okay, if the song I'm writing with this person goes all the way, it's going to be their closing time. And that's just kind of exciting. I can tell just by talking to you how much you love music, like you love it, you love making it. It just, it really does. It radiates off of you. How do you keep that love of making the art at the forefront of it all? I feel like when I was in my 20s, getting things going, I was really mad at the world for not paving the way for me. I would have a great idea and then nobody would appreciate it. And I kind of knew my ideas were good. So I can never say to somebody, don't be frustrated. I can never say to somebody like, child, it's going to be cool. It's all about being a lifer and enjoying the ride and making beautiful or alarming or

30:19scary or fun things with brilliant friends. And yet I kind of feel like if you can somehow learn, if you can remind yourself almost that like the things that look like success don't feel like success when they're happening. The thing that feels like success in music is being in a session with other musicians or even alone and making something and going, well that stands on its own. There's nothing more for me to do. Wow, I love it. That's way more gratifying than taking the same song and playing it on a huge stage. And someone like you was climbing up the charts, I was just worried the whole time. I just worried that it would stop climbing and it was going to go back down. I literally spent more time hoping it wouldn't start going down the chart again than I did saying, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you for this thing that's happening.

31:30That's it for us this week. We're working on an episode all about the art of throwing the perfect party. We want to know what's the best party you've ever gone to or hosted? What made it unforgettable? Send us an email to askvoxadvox.com or call 1-800-618-845. And if you find yourself at one this weekend, you can even call us from there. If you enjoyed the show, consider becoming a vox member. Members get cool stuff, like listening to this podcast, add free. Head over to vox.com slash members to learn more. And now it's credits time. Credits time. Time to say goodbye and also tell you who made the show. Produced by Hadi Mahwak DeFek, Jack Bimalissa, Hersch didn't get no.

32:39Credits time. Ginny Lawt edited. David Tata, Shore, engineered what you heard. Miranda Kennedy is our big boss and D.P. And I'm J.Q. Now goes breath the word. Thanks so much for subscribing and listening. Thanks so much for subscribing and listening. I'll talk to you soon. Bye. Do you hear that?

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