Music professor to aspiring pop stars: Don’t quit your day jobs.
More than a third of pop musicians will only strike it big once, according to a University of Colorado Denver professor’s analysis of decades of Billboard charts.
And that’s a generous filtering of the sobering reality, using the wider measure of the album charts.
Going by the singles charts — where “Funkytown,” “Macarena” and “Come On Eileen” live on together in infamy — nearly 50 percent of the artists who made it never got back there again.
Storm Gloor, an MBA and assistant professor at UCD’s College of Arts and Media, said the analysis of more than 50 years of Billboard charts shows that artists need a fallback, and record companies need a long-term plan.
“They need to know what they are facing as they start planning for their careers and beyond,” Gloor said.
Gloor’s study has a title as catchy as “Bust a Move” and “Baby Got Back”: “Just How Long is Your Fifteen Minutes?”
The subtitle, however, may be a bit more “She Blinded Me With Science”: “An Empirical Analysis of Artist’s Time on The Popular Charts.”
Musicians who do make it to the pop charts spend an average of 3.95 to 6.16 years there, depending on the genre, Gloor’s study says.
The next phase of Gloor’s work, which hasn’t yet been released, looks at how the fast-changing music culture is affecting musicians’ careers. Early data seems to show that artists are getting famous sooner but burning out faster.
The study offers no apologies for forcing readers to spend the rest of the day thinking about “Take On Me” and “Afternoon Delight.”
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Michael Booth: 303-954-1686 or mbooth@denverpost.com
