Band sell-by dates

A band's sell-by date on the outside is determined by its sell- by date on the inside.

awwwwwwww

surely you get them cheap if they are out of date

Possible answers: genres which require a high level of technical proficiency*, such as jazz, give back bone and support to the more ephemeral qualities such as creativity or expressiveness. Take a band like the Raincoats, who I think are a good example of a band who successfully made music without much apparent skill as instrumentalists. Nevertheless, they didn't put out too many recordings, did they? Anything I've heard aside from the core two haven't impressed me much. I think some people without strong technical skills can temporarily overcome their limitations through focus, through exuberance, through reckless experiment (and through paying attention to the results of their experiment), but somehow I don't think this can be sustained for very long. I think that in the long run, the artist with good technique has an advantage over the artist without. The artists without may arrive at some places that the more trained artist wouldn't have, but overall I think technique increases possibilities. Also, the challenge of overcoming the difficulties involved in making a music which is challenging to make may itself generate energy which keeps the creative process alive.

Funny, I sound like a real jazz apologist here, but I don't listen to much of it myself. (Though to drone on boringly, the old school Arabic music I listen to features artists who had similarly extended careers, and requires quite a bit of technical skill, particularly on the part of the singers.)

I expect this post to be ruthlessly attacked.

I can imagine entirely different explanations: rock and hip-hop as genres have in-built concepts of fashion that are different from those in jazz. They are more about youth, while jazz, if it was ever closely associated with youth, stopped being about that a long time ago. Of course, rock and hip hop are also more tied in to changes in technology than jazz is (and hip hop moreso than rock), but it's hard to see why a group couldn't make the leap to the next wave of technology. (And yet, this often does seem to be a problem. How does a group changes its sound, in response to new technological possibilities, while maintaining its identity as the same group? A group's signature sound may be closely tied to a particular phase of technology and when that becomes dated, the group itself may be stigmatized by virtue of that fact.)

*--I suppose I should cover myself by saying "a high level of technical proficiency along traditional lines (e.g., instrumental skill)," but I seriously doubt that either rock or rap requires any form of technique as elaborate as what jazz requires.

Three or four albums are enough for most artists, after that they either get repetetive or crap most of the time.

On the other hand, if I heard a comparably inventive band as the Raincoats (now playing, to remind myself what they sound like) with comparably bad singing, I probably wouldn't be too interested.

I wonder...which magazine/media pundit has the authority to go through and stamp an expiration date on a musicians neck like some clerk at the grocery store. And does this "curdling" of musical talent explain why old, "out-of-style" acts are called "cheesy?"
Does the pattern vary with genre. eg. Rap acts mature and decline faster than rock which are faster than jazz? Why should this be?
High end physicists, mathematicians and archeologists are starting to say that "time itself is accelerating"; this is why

• Classical lasted for centuries,
• Jazz lasted nearly 75 years
• Rock lasted roughly 50 years
• Punk had two stabs of greatness (lasting 2-3 years apiece)
• Grunge lasted about a year and a half
• and the Swing Revival and Latin Pop "eras" barely lasted 9 months apiece.

Our lust for novelty increases at the same speed as our attention span decreases.

If that was true, Nu-metal should have gone away by now. It hasn't: A 21 piece Nu-metal band just formed and began gigging around my town. Called 'White American'.