And You Thought It Would Fail / Music

• Michael Jackson:
  • In 1982, Epic Records thought Thriller, Jackson's follow-up to his 1979 smash Off the Wall, would flop due to its Genre Roulette. One hundred million copies, seven top ten singles, and eight Grammy Awards later, Michael Jackson would cement his legacy as the King of Pop.
  • Jackson did not feature rappers or other hip-hop elements in his 80's releases, as he thought hip-hop would just be a passing fad. Not only did it explode in popularity, but his sister Janet Jackson's work in pioneering New Jack Swing helped cement her own superstar status and a separate identity from her family, and she's been working with rappers and hip-hop producers ever since. Meanwhile, by the time Michael warmed up to the genre in the 90's and 2000's, it was seen as him trying anything to stay relevant.
• After Hearts and Bones flopped, Warner (Bros.) Records basically wrote Paul Simon off as a has-been. When they heard that his next project was going to be a fusion of pop and the music of South Africa, the label just rolled its eyes and let Simon do what he wanted with no interference, since odds were that no one would buy it anyway. The album was Graceland, which revitalized his career.
• When 1967's "Penny Lane" became the first Beatles single in four years to not hit #1 in England (it got to #2, kept out of the top by Engelbert Humperdinck's "Release Me"), the British press concluded that their successful run as artists was finally coming to an end. Then they released a little thing called Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
• In 2000, the French hip-hop duo Lunatic (Booba and Ali), released their first and only album, Mauvais Œil. Due to the nature of the lyrics (dark, gritty, violent and nihilistic), the album had little to no mainstream radio support, and Booba later stated in a 2008 interview that he'd considered selling merely 50 000 copies a success. Despite all of these factors? Mauvais Œil defied all expectations, went Gold (one of the first French rap independent albums to do so), was critically acclaimed and is now considered a French Rap Cult Classic.
• Booba, with Temps Mort, his first solo album, reiterated the same success. While Mauvais Œil had some mainstream radio "support" (and by that we mean broadcasting a few songs at night and in the weakest listening times), Temps Mort had none, with Skyrock director Laurent Bouneau (Skyrock was the big French radio at the time) referring to the album as "village rap". Temps Mort nonetheless went Gold, the 2003 re-release only boosted the sales (thanks to the Destinée song, which was much more mainstream-friendly, leading to Skyrock broadcasting it, even though the album was already selling well), the album was critically acclaimed, became yet another French rap Cult Classic, and Booba still remains a heavily successful French rapper today.
• German Industrial Metal band Rammstein had a lot of factors working against them for making an impression beyond the alternative metal scene of their home country, much less in America. Between their provocative imagery, performing all of their songs in German (American music listeners are especially resistant to songs sung in any other language than English), and lyrics covering dark subject matter, no one, much less the band members themselves, thought they'd make any splash. But those very factors (as well as a Colbert Bump from Trent Reznor putting them on the soundtrack of Lost Highway and appearing in XXX) helped launch Rammstein into global stardom, with the band being considered one of the greatest bands in the metal genre's history and their American fandom is so massive that the German version of the trope Germans Love David Hasselhoff is actually titled "Americans Love Rammstein".
• When Columbia Records executives heard the completed version of Pink Floyd's The Wall, they were apparently unimpressed. The label balked at releasing a double album, proposing reduced royalties. One exec even proposed flipping a coin with Roger Waters over it, but Waters refused, saying that he shouldn't have to gamble on something he owned. The label backed down, and the album became one of the band's most popular, second only to The Dark Side of the Moon in terms of sales.
• Atlantic Records, Peter Gabriel's U.S. label at the time, declined to release his third self-titled album (Melt) because they thought it was uncommercial. Not only did they think it would flop, they thought Gabriel had completely lost his mind. Mercury Records released it instead, with the single "Games Without Frontiers" becoming a hit in the U.K. and reaching the Top 100 stateside. The album also reached number 22 on the Billboard charts and went gold. The Atlantic exec who made the decision to drop Peter Gabriel, John Kalodner, quickly snapped him up for Geffen Records when he moved to the fledgling label, which later reissued the album.
• Also from Atlantic was Hootie & the Blowfish's debut studio album Cracked Rear View. Tim Sommer, the A&R man who signed Hootie to Atlantic and helped co-produce the record, tells the story in this article, saying that, in 1993, the only rock bands that any record label wanted to sign were grunge bands that sounded like Nirvana. Sommer had to fight tooth and nail to get Atlantic to give Hootie any support at all, receiving only a fraction of the money normally given to new artists, and when the head of A&R at Atlantic first heard Cracked Rear View, he described it as "unreleasable" and said that it had no singles. Sommer and product manager Kim Kaiman had to concoct a release strategy in which the first run of Cracked Rear View would go mainly to the Carolinas, where Hootie and most of their fanbase was from, and let it grow from there rather than try and release it nationally. Even Sommer thought the album would only sell about 50,000 copies, roughly the amount that the critical favorite alt-country band the Jayhawks had sold of their then-most recent album. Sommer took it as an omen when, just before he flew out to South Carolina to see Hootie perform for the first time, he took a look at the Billboard album charts and saw that Bob Seger's Greatest Hits Album was in the Top 10^note He probably misremembered exactly which artist's album it was; he describes making the trip to sign Hootie in August of 1993, but Bob Seger's Greatest Hits came out on October 25, 1994, three months after Cracked Rear View. However, Rod Stewart's unplugged album did make it into the Top 10 in August 1993, as did Aerosmith's Get a Grip, while Billy Joel's River of Dreams debuted at #1 towards the end of the month. — to him, a sign that there was a vast market of rock fans who didn't like grunge and had been left sorely under-served by the major labels. Twenty million records later, and Sommer's hunch was very much vindicated.
• All major record labels in France rejected Jean-Michel Jarre's Oxygène because it lacked everything that they thought good music needed like vocals and guitars. Nobody would want to listen to eight-minute tunes fading into each other anyway and such. They had to seriously reconsider after Oxygène was published by the small jazz label Motors Records — and sold ten million copies right away.
• Radiohead's OK Computer received a tepid reception from their US label, Capitol Records, who deemed it commercial suicide. The album debuted at no. 1 in the UK, reached no. 21 in the US, contained three top ten hits in the UK (including the no. 3 hit "Paranoid Android"). It was later certified 3x platinum in the UK and 2x platinum in the U.S., while critics in both the US and UK praised the album, proving that Radiohead's more experimental approach to the album paid off.
• Willie Nelson released his Stardust album of jazz standards in 1978 amid heavy doubts from his record label, who didn't think a jazz album from an outlaw country singer would have a chance. Ten solid years on the charts later...
• According to Beck, after recording and submitting his second major-label album, Odelay, an executive told him that releasing the album was "a huge mistake", and Beck spent a few months thinking that he'd "blown it forever". It sold over two million copies in the U.S. alone, produced three sizable hit singles, won Beck two Grammy Awards, and received great reviews from critics, proving to the world that he was more than just a one-hit wonder.
• When talent show Popstars: The Rivals announced they would be creating two rival groups most people assumed the winners would be boy band One True Voice. In the event they only got to number 2 with their first single and split up soon after releasing their second. Instead the winners were the female group Girls Aloud, who went on to be the most successful reality TV group in history.
• Apparently, Beyoncé herself in regards to her self-titled album. On "Ghost/Haunted", she ad-libs, "Probably won't make no money off this...oh well." She was proven very wrong as besides the album's rave reviews, cultural impact and popularizing of the "surprise albums" in the music industry, the album also had massive sales. Though, given BEYONCÉ's more experimental sound, the complete lack of promotion before its release, and the relatively less impressive performance of her previous album 4, it would have been understandable for her to lack faith in the album's commercial viability.
• As Joe Elliot tells it, a then unknown budding record producer named Rick Rubin approached him to seek permission to use the name "Def" for his new record label. Joe agreed, without even demanding any royalty deal. Something he regrets a lot now, since that label turned out to be Def Jam Recordings.
• British house duo Oxide and Neutrino created a Top 10 hit - "Up Middle Finger" - based on this. They were called a cheesy novelty act due to their debut single "Bound 4 Da Reload (Casualty)" sampling the theme to medical TV drama CASUAL+Y. The single sold 250,000 copies - despite the lack of radio airplay - entering the charts at No1. The song also features a sample from them performing their "novelty" single at a BBC Radio 1 live event, with the 100,000 audience taking part.

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