If there’s a formula to selling out, I think every band in the world would be doing it. The fact that you write good songs and you sell too many of them, if everybody in the world knew how to do that they’d do it. It’s not something we chose to do.
—Mike Dirnt, Greenday
Since music builds a hugely intimate relationship between the creator and their audience, the deviation from a sound, a feeling, or a genre sometimes feels like a betrayal. And if you’re looking for a knife-cut to the gut, the go-to phrase to callout a formerly favored artist is “sellout”. The implication that a person is so low-brow as to trade their integrity for some scratch is pretty vitriolic. And insults feel good to throw around if you’ve been betrayed, so why not?
I’d argue that there’s no such thing as a sellout. That’s why not.
Let’s define what we’re talking about here. A sellout is thought of as a...
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