Consider the fabled "failed second album," where hot new bands mess it up following up a breakthrough hit. I was thinking about this yesterday because I'd listened to Suede's Dog Man Star and Saint Etienne's Tiger Bay1—both received negatively when they came out. Thing is, they're now obviously brilliant and were disliked by contemporary critics in 1994 mostly because they weren't Britpop. Today I awake to the satisfaction of other people thinking the same things as me: Critics, not fans, perpetuate the failed second album myth, study shows.
"It's only critics that show substantial evidence of a sophomore slump bias, whereby they are giving artists' second albums unusually low reviews compared to their first and third albums," [Gregory] Webster said. "Fans show no evidence of a sophomore slump bias."
Webster and [Lysann] Zander expected that fan ratings would reflect a broader consensus about a band's true performance. Fans aren't pressured by the same social norms as professional critics. And with ratings from thousands of fans, the researchers could average across a large group to find more reliable ratings.
The paper is Burning out, fading away, and the sophomore slump: Critics' versus fans' ratings of music artists' album quality over time, by Gregory D. Webster and Lysann Zander.
Folk psychology posits that music artists' first albums are considered their best, whereas later albums draw fewer accolades, and that artists' second albums are considered worse than their first—a phenomenon called the "sophomore slump." This work is the first large-scale multi-study attempt to test changes in album quality over time and whether a sophomore slump bias exists. Study 1 examined music critics, sampling all A, B, and C entries from The New Rolling Stone Record Guide (2,078 album reviews, 387 artists, 38 critics). Study 2 examined music fans, sampling crowdsourced Rate Your Music ratings of artists with at least one Rolling Stone top 500 album (4,030 album reviews, 254 artists). Using multilevel models, both studies showed significant linear declines in ratings of artists' album quality over artists' careers; however, the linear effects were qualified by significantly positive quadratic effects, suggesting slightly convex patterns where declines were steeper among earlier (vs later) albums. Controlling for these trends, a significant and substantial sophomore slump bias was observed for critics' ratings, but not for fans' ratings. We discuss theoretical perspectives that may contribute to the observed effects, including regression to the mean, cognitive biases and heuristics, and social psychological accounts.
I'll admit to not being quite so sure about The Stone Roses' Second Coming. 1994 was an interesting year in music…
Tony Levin, maybe: "You have a decade of obscurity to write your first album and a year of celebrity to write your second."
1. Tiger Bay was also Saint Etienne's third album, but fits the mold as their first, Foxbase Alpha was not a hit.
