Farfisa

Any band that has merchandise at hot topic sold out........if they had like shirts and **** from bands that I actually like for a reasonable price.......yeah I'd shop there but I actually buy stuff from thrift stores now.

SATCHMO

Marketing is a crucial part of running any business, which is what a band is in part. I think people mistakenly equate a bands increased popularity or success with being a sellout. thats not necessarily so.It's OK to make tons of money in every other career field. Why is music different? Nobody ever points the finger at the record company execs who, in many cases are the only ones getting rich off a bands success.
The whole Green Day plague on MB was annoying cuz' kids were associating GD with punk without any exposure to any other punk bands or any knowledge of the genre's history. Selling out is an artists intentional disregard of musical integrity for the sake of generating more income or widening their audience.
Bob Dylan was called a sellout when he made the great switch from acoustic folk to electric rock in 1965, but it was his artistic license to do. His response to people complaining that he wasn't writing political folk anthems was "write your own anthems". Amen.

Davey Moore

So Bob Marley, Pink Floyd and The Beatles are sellouts?

F*ck.

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The Edge... there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.

Dr_Rez

haha, of coarse, once you sell a tshirt there goes your carrear.

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DJ Phoenix

Not true! Hot Topic sells shirts of The Smiths, and you can't tell me they "sold out"?. Most have, yes. The Smiths? not so much.

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lucifer_sam

The entire proposition of "selling out" is a ridiculous assertion and is an excuse for people who enjoyed a band prior to their genre shift/crappy album release to say "they used to be good." If you are seriously naive enough to follow such dogmatic bullshit, you need to pull your head out of your ass and see the music industry isn't as innocent as you saw it before.

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Rainard Jalen

Completely disagree. It's perfectly intuitive and reflects actual fact:

- a band, on a small label, is renowned in the music community for being audacious, adventurous, creative, daring and innovative
- they then sign a massive multi-million dollar record contract
- their output subsequent to signing the new deal is entirely commercially driven and conforms to pretty much every convention of pop/mainstream currently existing in the present market
- plainly, though this would be quite an extreme case scenario, it is certainly "selling out".

Selling out, basically, should be understood to be changing something in your product in order to capitalize on the market. Short of this, there is no selling out. You're simply not selling out unless you modify something in your creative output in order to make more money.

For this reason, statements made in songs like Tool's "Hooker With A P3nis" are odd. The satirical idea that by simply making a record you have sold yourself out falls plainly outside of the spirit of what 'selling out' is conventionally understood to mean. There is a wide gulf of difference between merely selling your creative output, and changing your creative output to make it more 'sellable'. The LATTER is what anybody who talks of 'selling out' means by it. Thus, 'selling out', as with any other term, is to be judged on the basis of how it is conventionally defined.

lucifer_sam

In all likelihood if a band did that I doubt they would care about the integrity of their own music in the first place.

I just grow despondent when people say "that band sold out" when they mean to say "their later albums showed a change in direction." It's like a hot button for idiots that like to insult a band without actually having to offer any logical reasoning.

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Rainard Jalen

That's very true actually. Like with Tool, for example - a lot of people claimed they sold out with 10,000 Days, just because it included two plausible Modern Rock Chart hits and people didn't like that. Truth was, there was no sign of selling out at all - they were just trying to mix things up a bit and make an album that had the progressive impulses of Lateralus, but with a little more melodic/songful sensibility.

Arya Stark

Personally, I don't say that any bands... "sell out."

But I do think it means more than just changing the direction.

I feel that it means they began playing for the money rather than the music, therefore changing the direction of their focus AND music.

Do you disagree?

A little bit like Avril Lavigne and RJA. (Who are now both in Kohl's commercials.)

Red Jumpsuit Apparatus's singer is very egotistical in his ways, and gives off a very... "bow at my feet" presence. That's just my take of his attitude. >.<