Originally Posted by cardboard adolescent

To me there's different reasons for making music, you can make music to make an artistic statement, to entertain, or to spread your message. If you're making music to entertain or spread a message, changing your style to be more publicly accessible is really in keeping with your main goals, it's basically the equivalent of musicians practicing to increase their technical abilities (unless of course you're spreading a diy anti-consumerist message, in which case that would just be hypocrisy). So in those cases, I don't think it really makes sense to talk about "selling out." If, on the other hand, you're trying to make an artistic statement but you find that nobody really cares about art anymore, they just care about catchy hooks and soothing sounds, so you change your style to sell more I think it makes sense to talk about selling out, since your original motivation for making music has been left behind. I think most musicians that are really concerned with art, however, tend not to do this, or if they do change their sound it still contains traces of their original purpose.

In the case of the first two, however, I think bands that serve simply to entertain or spread their message get accused of selling out a lot when really they're just undergoing a natural progression and the fans are just bitter that they've been left behind. I don't feel that a band has an obligation to make the records their fans want to hear.