Recognition Killed the Radio Star? Recognition Orientations and Sustained Creativity After the Best New Artist Grammy Nomination

Sampling logic

As our research focuses on the effects of early recognition on creative groups over time, we used a logic of purposeful sampling (Patton, 2002; Yin, 2009) to find an extreme context—one that offers a transparent, unfettered view of the dynamics of interest (Eisenhardt, 1989; Pettigrew, 1990; Yin, 2009). The music industry requires constant competition among new songs for radio play and weekly changes in Billboard chart positions, creating an extremely competitive environment that “works to privilege innovation” (Toynbee, 2000: 10). Yet to maintain a career, musicians cannot rely on “sudden bursts of innovation but the continual production of familiarity and newness” (Negus, 1998: 362; cf. Askin and Mauskapf, 2017). Hence, “people who make popular music are creators” (Toynbee, 2000: 35; emphasis in original). Popular music fits the logic of an extreme context for studying the interplay of creativity and group work over time because it privileges creative work: “Like any cultural artefact . . . music is the result of a variational-selection process” (Mauch et al., 2015: 9). Moreover, the popular nature of pop music privileges creative work with widespread appeal, thereby promising insight into creative work that can have a practical impact, much the same way that studying Edison’s light bulb (Hargadon and Douglas, 2001) or the emergence of the iPod (Dedrick, Kraemer, and Linden, 2010) offers insights on generating broadly influential creative products.

We bounded our sampling by looking at groups that earned a nomination for the Grammy for Best New Artist, a legitimate arbiter of creativity in the pop music field (Anand and Watson, 2004). The Best New Artist Grammy has been awarded annually since 1959 by the Recording Academy (formerly the National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences), which was founded with “the explicit mandate of instituting annual awards that would recognize artistic merit rather than commercial appeal or sales” (Anand and Watson, 2004: 63, citing Schipper, 1992). This is generally the way it continues to be, and as with other Grammys, the Recording Academy voting members determine the nominees and winners. ³ In spite of the award’s prestige (Anand and Watson, 2004; English, 2005), there is folk wisdom that winning the Best New Artist Grammy is also a curse; many winners have struggled to match their early success in the years that followed. For example, Colin Hay, lead singer of 1983’s Best New Artist, the group Men at Work, reflected jokingly while reading the inscription on the actual Grammy Award, “‘Men at Work—Best New Artists–slash–Kiss of Death Award’” (VH1, Where Are They Now? Men at Work, 2002). Our own music listening habits led to a similar conclusion, which motivated our data collection.

Sample selection

Because our research questions focus on the experience and aftermath of early recognition for creative groups, we sampled 52 bands and artists nominated for the Best New Artist Grammy from 1980–1990. We excluded three nominees from our analyses: Robin Williams, who was nominated for a comedy album and was primarily a comedian; the Blues Brothers, who formed through the television show Saturday Night Live and also had comedic aims; and Milli Vanilli, whose Grammy was later revoked due to the revelation that the members had not actually performed on the nominated album. While the Grammy sample includes both bands and individual artists, our qualitative analysis revealed that solo artists tend to have primarily a mixed orientation (described below). Hence we focused our theorizing on creative groups rather than on solo artists.

The time frame we studied allowed us to collect data through most of a full career, as the bands that began their careers in 1990 (the end of our sampling frame) became eligible to be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2015. We were therefore able to examine the aftermath of the wins or nominations over a substantial time horizon. Selecting this time frame also allowed two other benefits. First, prior to the 1980s, there was less media focus on popular music, meaning fewer interviews were conducted and, as a result, less available data, especially for lesser-known bands. Focusing on the ten years between 1980 and 1990 allowed us to capitalize on the increased availability of band interviews, which provide evidence of groups’ responses and reactions to recognition. Second, bands that became popular in the 1980s were subject to disruptive shifts in music, revealing this period as a time of heightened musical creativity (see Figure 2a in Askin and Mauskapf, 2017). These shifts included the introduction of MTV (1981) and the mainstreaming of hard rock, synthesizers, and other computerized sounds that expanded the realm of recording possibilities (Théberge, 2004; Serrà et al., 2012).

Qualitative data

We searched newspaper, magazine, and video databases with the name of each band and band member to locate publicly available interviews for the groups and artists in our sample. For our entire sample, we collected over 4,130 pages of text, including transcribed video interviews. We then ordered these interviews by date for each band, creating, in effect, an oral history of each band’s career by the band members themselves.

Quantitative evidence of creativity and recognition

As our emergent themes coalesced around different reactions to recognition, we sought to triangulate these findings with quantitative data where appropriate. Two themes stood out in our data that merited triangulation. First, bands varied in their descriptions of the degree to which they experimented with the acoustic features of their songs on subsequent albums or kept a signature sound. As we fully describe in the findings, we gathered data on the acoustic features of later albums and compared them with the acoustic features of the Grammy-nominated album to triangulate whether there was additional evidence suggesting that bands experimented with their sound. Second, bands varied in their longevity and performance over time. To further investigate these issues, we gathered not only data on subsequent Grammy nominations but also data for every original U.S. studio album released by the groups, the album’s peak position on the Billboard 200 albums chart, RIAA rankings, “Best Ever Albums” rankings in release year and overall, and the number of songs covered by other artists (collected from secondhandsongs.com). ⁴ Following prescriptions for inductive research to use multiple forms of data for triangulation (Rouse and Harrison, 2015), we used these data to triangulate our qualitative data with indicators of ongoing creative productivity (album releases and time spent working on new material) and associated forms of creative performance (e.g., critics’ and fans’ rankings, album sales, chart positions, songs covered by other artists). See Online Appendix B in this article’s supplementary material for the latter analyses.

Internalizing expectations: Benchmarking backward

Almost immediately after receiving their early recognition, absorbing groups begin to use it as a benchmark for the recognition they expect in the future. Perhaps the most succinct description of this need came from the Human League: “When you get a number one it’s very strange. When it happens, it’s a moment of euphoria, followed by a huge crash. You just know someone is going to say, ‘Oh, I bet you can’t do that again’” (Joanne Catherall, singer, 2009). The Go-Go’s felt this, too. Early on, they described feeling a sort of omnipresent pressure and struggling to deal with it through humor: “We laugh a lot, but when we’re together we have to giggle. It puts everything on a more superficial level, but it’s the only way to deal with the pressure. It’d be torture if we couldn’t goof off” (Wiedlin, 1982). Looking back on this period, they could see that the pressure came from having to live up to the early album and the recognition it gained. In talking about their second album, Valentine noted that the song “Vacation” provided a bit of a reprieve because it matched the sound and performed comparably to singles from the band’s first album. This reprieve was short-lived, though; the practice of benchmarking on the past ensured that future releases would be fraught with the same pressure:

If it wasn’t for “Vacation,” it would’ve been the end of our career. We had to have another hit. If we made a second record without something that could get on the radio, that would’ve been it for us. The same with Talk Show. Without “Head Over Heels,” it would’ve been over. So thank goodness we were able, despite falling apart at the seams, to generate “Vacation” and “Head Over Heels” and some smaller singles, with videos that were catchy, and other good songs that still hold up to light. (Valentine, 2000)

As a result, the group felt that it was chasing its own legacy. Caffey explained, “We knew that we had a legacy of songs that we had to kinda . . . not try to recreate, but try to live up to. And that was our bottom line” (2000). The pressure to match the recognition of their debut made the creative process increasingly challenging. Valentine remarked that their process had become “brutal,” and Wiedlin concurred that “we’re being all hyper-critical on ourselves” (2000). Part of the reason for this is that absorbing groups obsess over audience opinions and reactions.

Internalizing expectations: Weighing audience opinions

Absorbing groups grow to care deeply about external audiences’ opinions and reactions to their work. They begin treating these opinions—whether from fans, record label executives, critics, other bands, or all four—as evidence of creative success and factor them into their creative process. As audience opinions become a barometer for their sense of progress and achievement, these groups desire greater future recognition, particularly from new audiences and fan groups. Early on, Schock said as much: “Sometimes the recognition gets weird, and there are some people in the industry who aren’t ready to accept us yet. But just the other night, we were at a Japanese restaurant and this Japanese girl came running up to me saying, ‘Go-Go! Go-Go!’ That was really neat” (1981). As recognition increased their profile, The Go-Go’s also fixated on whether critics and other gatekeepers had misrepresented or overlooked them—and found respite in the warm reception from fans. Valentine explained, “I felt that we had been dismissed and overlooked a lot. . . . Sometimes I would see ‘Women who Rock,’ and we would be, like, a footnote” (2021). She elaborated that “hearing from fans” helped to “make up for a lot of rejection.” The Go-Go’s also described longing for years to be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame: “Every year in the past it was like, ‘Oh, you’re gonna be inducted next year, definitely.’ And it just kept . . . We were like, ‘Okay, Hell’s bells, we’re not ever gonna be inducted” (Schock, 2021).

Because absorbing groups fixate on achieving greater recognition from external audiences, these groups tend to use audience opinions as cues that dictate major group decisions, such as whether to keep pursuing a particular sound or even to reunite. Reflecting on how Beauty and the Beat sounded slicker and more heavily produced than the band’s raucous and raw live shows, Valentine said, “In time, what we thought had been a too-sterile production stopped bothering us. My opinion changed proportionally with the increasing sales. . . . None of the stuff we disliked stopped our first album from being one of the most successful debuts ever” (2020). Hence The Go-Go’s even began subverting their own tastes and creative direction because the public response was so positive. Audience relationships are therefore closely tied to how absorbing groups make sense of their work and play a major role in their creative decisions. But these are not the only relationships that take on new meaning for absorbing groups; relationships with one another and with outsiders change as well. We label these changes as “opening relationships,” which includes working against one another and finding new voices.

Opening relationships: Working against one another

Absorbing groups initially describe themselves as a unit, a collective: “We were united against the world, that’s the way I felt with these girls. We could do no wrong. We were just like this pack of chicks having the time of our lives, kinda carte blanche to the world, and it felt like a team at that time” (Caffey, 2000). But after early recognition, absorbing groups shift from working together as a group toward a collection of individuals working against one another. Wiedlin captured the transition succinctly: “In the beginning we were a gang of girls out to have a good time. Then we got famous and instead of being The Go-Go’s against the world, it became The Go-Go’s against each other” (2020). For The Go-Go’s, fragmentation manifested in their opinions about their creative work. After releasing their second album, two of the group members voiced a fundamental disagreement in terms of how they conceived of the group’s style:

This fracturing reared its head in their songwriting as well. Carlisle highlighted the outsize weight of individual opinions, describing how each song “has to pass a lot of tests” (2000). Wiedlin concurred: “Every song has to please five different people’s taste, and we don’t have the same taste” (2000). As a result, good ideas could fizzle:

Sometimes a writer or a pair of writers will be so excited and so proud of a song. . . . You really don’t know. You really can think you have something special, and then you take it in, and all it takes is for one person to go, “I don’t know,” and then it’s back to the drawing board. (Valentine, 2000)

The decision process regarding new material shifted from being communal to combative. The group described itself as “fragmenting very quickly” and attempting to maintain an “eye in the hurricane” in the midst of “a lot of conflicting energy” (Valentine, 2018). Valentine revealed, “There’s been times we’re in the dressing room, throwing stuff at each other. I think somebody got hit once” (2018).

Opening relationships: Finding new voices

Out of a desire to replicate their early recognition while also appealing to new audiences, absorbing groups open their group boundaries, allowing external figures to affect their creative process. Schock reflected, “We didn’t have any time to think, they’d [the record company and its representatives] tell us what to do and we’d just do it. . . . We did everything that they told us to do. We didn’t know any better. And we were so used to working like dogs, we just thought, ‘Oh, this is the way it goes’” (2000). The Go-Go’s hoped that outsiders’ ideas would improve the creativity of their next albums; by the late 1990s, they were relying on more producers than ever. Valentine noted, “Not only does [a song] have to process and screen through all five Go-Go’s, but our producers, our record company” (2000). Reflecting on their work process for their third album, Carlisle revealed that their song “Head Over Heels” was a lyrical description of what was going on in the band: “That song lyrically was about how we were all feeling being under this microscope, having so much fame, the confusion, the self-sabotage. We started to implode a bit” (2016). The lyrics reveal that they might have opened the band too much to outside influences: “No more connections, I don’t need any more advice.”

By internalizing expectations and opening relationships, absorbing groups seem to limit their ability to regain the levels of creativity and recognition they desperately want to preserve. Instead, these groups grow to adopt creative practices of accelerating work and recreating (old) sound, as well as more distal, career-defining outcomes of lower productivity and worse critical reception and resentment (toward aspects of their early recognition) followed by eventual gratitude.

Creative practice: Accelerating work

In absorbing groups, creating a new album becomes intertwined with pressure from the record label, a feeling that they will lose their existing audience if they wait too long. This creates a sense of urgency. In a 1982 interview, Rolling Stone noted that after six months of nonstop touring, The Go-Go’s’“nerves were frayed, their tempers on edge,” and they were facing strong pressure to keep up their momentum after their first album. The record label provided them with new producers, and they rushed to release their second album, Vacation, within the year. Reflecting on that record, Valentine noted, “We rushed ourselves. The label wanted to release another single, and possibly more. . . . I wish somebody had told us to shut up and take some time off and then go out on the road again. Because we were not ready for the second record” (2020). Such frenetic pacing seems to amplify tensions in absorbing groups, which manifests in exhaustion and breakups—and, not surprisingly, detracts from creative performance. Interpersonal conflict grew as The Go-Go’s wrote and released their third album, Talk Show, in 1984. The album maintained the pop-rock style of the group’s first two albums but was a commercial letdown, selling fewer than 500,000 copies. Tensions in the group continued to build. By 1985, the group members were fighting with each other and acrimoniously decided to disband to pursue solo work. Carlisle reflected, “It would’ve been foolish to carry on the way we were with all that anger and resentment” (1990). Eventually the band entered cycles of optimistic reunions and frustrated breakups that continued through the 2010s. The group’s final album, God Bless The Go-Go’s, was a critical and commercial failure. The group continued to tour until 2013, when Valentine sued her bandmates over financial issues.

Creative practice: Recreating (old) sound

Due to their heightened need for renewed recognition, absorbing groups fixate on the aesthetic qualities of their music, particularly those of the early album that brought them their initial creative recognition. When commenting on their fourth album, Caffey identified certain aesthetic qualities as being essential to the group’s musical history: “We’ve always been very melodic, we’ve always had harmonies, and great bass parts and guitar parts and drum parts. . . . Our classic elements are there” (2000). This connection to a particular aesthetic heavily influenced The Go-Go’s’ subsequent work, as they held the aesthetics of their first album as a standard to meet—part of their benchmarking behavior. Valentine echoed the sentiment: “Our standards are really, really high, I think. It’s going to sound like The Go-Go’s. If it’s coming from us, and being filtered through us, what we’re gonna end up . . . it’s gonna sound very like the Go-Go’s” (2000). Schock added, “[We’re making] good Go-Go’s music, like, what we sound like, only, you know, new songs” (2000). This focus on “standards” and “sound” seemed to limit the band’s ability to experiment and produce albums that critics and fans saw as creative or as an evolution.

Distal outcome: Lower productivity and worse critical reception

The Go-Go’s released three albums in rapid succession in the early 1980s and only one additional album nearly two decades later. The frenetic pacing, infighting, and routine breakups dramatically impeded the group’s ability to generate more creative output. Commenting on their 1990 compilation album, Valentine revealed that the band’s issues felt irreconcilable and inimical to future creativity: “[It] was a horrible breakup. We never discussed future possibilities. When it was over, I walked away without any expectations of doing anything else with The Go-Go’s” (1994).

Without sufficient time or motivation to experiment and with a fixation on recreating their early sound, absorbing bands tend to stagnate creatively. This pattern is reflected both in reduced numbers of albums after the one that spawned the early creative recognition and in lackluster reviews of the albums that are released. The Go-Go’s’ second album, Vacation, was a commercial disappointment: it was certified Gold, whereas Beauty and the Beat had gone Triple Platinum. Music critic Stephen Thomas Erlewine noted that the album had a slicker, more radio-ready sound than their initial release—likely due in part to the involvement of new producers—which cost the album some of the “giddy sense of fun” that marked their debut. ⁷ Robert Christgau, another respected music critic, also noted the album’s “uniform thinness” in comparison to Beauty and the Beat. ⁸ Erlewine further commented that despite having some solid songs, the group’s third album, Talk Show, was “undermined by its own ambition” and “cluttered with half-realized songs and an overly detailed production.” ⁹

Distal outcome: Resentment followed by eventual gratitude

Amid these cycles of exhaustion, breakup, and attempted reunion, absorbing groups resent aspects of their early recognition. In addition to feeling mislabeled as a 1960s girl group, The Go-Go’s resented that their early recognition overshadowed their later projects. Referring to their 2001 album, God Bless The Go-Go’s, Wiedlin said, “I really stand behind that record. I think the songwriting is good, so it’s very unfortunate to me that hardly anyone ever heard that record” (2020). In 2011, in response to a journalist asking if she thought The Go-Go’s had “been properly acknowledged for [their] music,” Wiedlin responded, “No, I do not believe we got our propers, but I hope someday we will.” With distance, though, they eventually came to feel gratitude for the early output that garnered their early creative recognition, specifically for the album or hit song that drove the Best New Artist nomination. Valentine commented, “What we did in our past, I mean our first record, in my opinion, was a really great classic record. It just transcends all time” (2000). The Go-Go’s also longed for the circumstances surrounding the creation of their first album, before the challenges presented by early recognition entered the picture. Schock explained:

What I remember to be the best time was before we got really, really huge—before we got really successful. . . . Everyone knew each other, and everyone was friends with each other. . . . And also making our record was a wonderful thing, our first record. And we got to go to New York to make it. That was our dream-come-true. (2000)

By benchmarking backward, weighing audience opinions, and opening their relationships and expectations to outsiders, absorbing groups become increasingly consumed with earning future recognition. Groups then find themselves making albums in response to external pressures, leading both to frenetic pacing that ultimately leaves them less productive (often because of multiple breakups) and to efforts to recreate their old sound. The resentment engendered through this process eventually gives way to gratitude for the creativity that brought them early recognition, but ironically, additional recognition rarely materializes.

Externalizing expectations: Benchmarking forward

Instead of focusing on—and becoming overly attached to—the intense creative recognition of the early album, insulating groups focus on what will come next. Adu acknowledged the expectations that accompanied Sade’s early recognition but seemed more interested in moving past it:

Everybody’s very skeptical about someone who has early, huge success. I want to prove to myself that there’s something there. I want to make a great album to follow Diamond Life, to stretch and come forward as a band. We’ve only just started, and we’ve got a lot to do. Diamond Life has been a success, but that’s finished now. We’re only just getting used to working together as a band. (Adu, 1985)

As this quotation attests, insulating groups have high standards for what they want to produce, but they avoid benchmarking on past recognition, choosing to free their current work from their prior creative achievement. Instead, they focus on the future as a new creative endeavor; a sense of “progress” in their music becomes a central part of their process. Adu elaborated:

I think you have to distance yourself from the previous album. Otherwise, you don’t really progress. The best part of what we do is make the records. If you don’t have any part away from the music business and such, there is nothing really that inspires you to make the record. And though it seems like we’ve been away longer because the record comes out and then tour so the gap between the record for us is shorter than a person who gets an album from us. (Adu, 2017)

Externalizing expectations: Weighing group opinions

An insulating orientation also has implications for how groups react to external audiences’ evaluations of their work. Though Sade enjoyed receiving recognition for their work, external validation was not their primary motivator. What mattered most was how the group itself felt about the music:

Recognition and rewards were something of an afterthought for the band. Adu explained, “[My] number one [motivator] is people and caring for people and people caring for me. . . . Number two is the music we’re making, and number three is getting some rewards from it, if you like” (1984). Unlike absorbing groups, insulating groups deprioritize seeking broader recognition; they work instead to hone an internal sense of creative success. Adu noted that most important to the band was “making something that has quality and something that is lasting” (1984). Insulating groups also sometimes find satisfaction in respected peers’ acknowledgment of their work; Adu commented on caring about “the opinion of people I respect, whose taste I consider valid” (1986). Ultimately, though, the group’s inner barometer for creative success was most important: “It’s important that we succeed, but only as long as we’re sticking to our lines and principles. Success for the sake of success is nothing. Success in everybody else’s terms means nothing” (1986).

Bandmate Stuart Matthewman reflected on incorporating this inward orientation into the group’s creative process: “We never think about the record company, we never think about friends or fans, we never think about radio. . . . We’re not thinking about anyone else. . . . I do think you should think about the fans but hopefully our fans will grow with us” (2012). Hence insulating groups appreciate external audiences but do not allow them to influence the creative process or how the group evaluates its own creative performance. As Adu explained in 2010, “Artistically, I have high aspirations. I don’t want to do anything less than the best I can do.”

Bounding relationships: Working through one another

While reflecting on their first album that garnered Grammy recognition, Adu noted that a key goal was “to stick together as friends, and enjoy it, keep enjoying it. I mean that is of fundamental importance, that we keep enjoying each other’s company. I think that’s the only way we can keep making good albums anyway” (1984). This sense of working as a collective endured. Years later, in a description dominated by the collective first-person “we,” Matthewman took pains to note that group members were not simply responsible for playing their own instruments but that they played through each other:

What we do is, we just go into the studio and we just write songs. We don’t write songs for any specific purpose. We don’t write for radio, then say, “Now we’re going to write a ballad and a hip-hop track.” It just kinda happens. It’s whatever feeling we feel. I think working that way, our music is more permanent. We’re a four-piece band, and if you take any member out, it’s going to sound slightly different. . . . Sade doesn’t play guitar, but she plays it through me. . . . We all kinda play each other that way. (1996)

Working “through” each other involves a sense of open, unfettered collaboration. Adu described, for instance, how the band would let its songwriting process evolve naturally and make creative choices “without pragmatism”:

When we’re in the studio, what we do just sort of happens and evolves without pragmatism. . . . It’s all about choices. . . . We know that between us, we will somehow make the right decision. We many times do the wrong thing. You just have to know when the moment happens. (2011)

This is not to say that the process was devoid of conflict. Sometimes the intuitive “magic” of their decision making also required a “fight,” but they were “grappling” and “strangling” the music, not each other: “Well, some [songs] come as if by magic, you know, as if they were already written by somebody and we’re going through the process. Others you have to grapple with them and get them on the floor and strangle them and fight with them to get them to work” (Adu, 1992). Matthewman affirmed that the group continued to follow this more collaborative and intuitive approach to decision making: “We just do what sounds right to us at that time. . . . It always ends up kind of sounding like us anyway” (2012).

Bounding relationships: Keeping trusted voices

Unlike absorbing groups, which perceive pressure to make a certain kind of product in order to earn more recognition, insulating groups use their success as a resource to protect their creative freedom. Upon the release of their first album, Adu explained, “Success means we can carry on without compromise, make another record and see where that leads us” (1985). In addition to maintaining full creative control over their work processes, Sade insulated themselves from external influences while working on their second album: “I was away from the media, I was away from any sort of pressure from the record company, we were all sort of in our own little environment, and I think that comes through in the album. When there was something to write, we got together and wrote it” (Adu, 1988). The group maintained this protective ethos over time: “It is almost like a church, because you’re going to that room, you know your purpose, you know what you’re going to do in there, and you don’t have to take anything in with you that you don’t want to take in there” (Adu, 2010).

As a band, they also pressed to keep working with trusted producers. In the midst of their early recognition, there was a push for Sade to work with top producers like Quincy Jones. One recounting of these events noted,

All those same record companies, who turned them down were crawling all over Sade. They were desperate to sign her. The record companies all told her that they were going to send her to America, that she was going to be great, and she was going to work with Quincy Jones. She said, “I don’t want to go to America and work with Quincy Jones. I love Quincy Jones, but I’m quite happy here, and I’m quite happy working with Robin (their then-producer).” The record companies weren’t pleased when she told them that. She said, “That’s too bad.” CBS Records, now Sony Records, were the only record company who said, “If you want to work with Robin, you can work with Robin.” (Robin Millar, Producer for Diamond Life and Promise, 2014)

In addition, Sade acknowledged that they were part of the machine of the music industry, but they made an effort to distance themselves from extraneous activities. Group members relied on one another to maintain their guiding principle of staying focused on the music:

[T]here are four of us, and we can remind each other what our initial principles were without getting lost. It’s not just me. [Our principles are to] not do the things that demean what you do. To try and avoid as much as possible doing things that have nothing to do with what you set out to do—with the music. (Adu, 1990)

By refusing to benchmark backward, working through instead of against one another, and focusing on the group’s trusted insiders, insulating groups create space for themselves to continue their creative endeavors on their own time and with their own principles. This orientation, in contrast with an absorbing one, seems to generate creative practices that are much more beneficial to the creative process: steady pacing of work and experimenting with sound. Over the long run, this appears to enable sustained productivity and better critical reception and gratitude moment by moment.

Creative practice: Steady pacing of work

While absorbing groups exhibit frenetic pacing, insulating groups seem to tune into the natural ebbs and flows of creative energy. Rather than creating a new album because of external pressure, which engenders the tension observed in absorbing groups, insulating groups take time off when they feel creatively depleted, regardless of how they believe this may impact their ability to achieve ongoing recognition for their work. The members of Sade made a habit of stepping back from the spotlight as a deliberate response to having released and promoted a new album. Adu commented on the benefits of this practice for interpersonal relationships and for their overall enjoyment of the work: “Without [the long breaks between records and tours] we probably would have been d-i-v-o-r-c-e-d a long time ago. Actually, the gaps make making a record such a special privilege” (2010). Matthewman affirmed this appreciation for time apart: “If we were together all the time, we probably wouldn’t have lasted as long as we did” (2012).

Rather than reuniting in attempts to garner recognition, insulating groups get back together when they feel a renewed sense of purpose as artists. Adu explained that the group reunited to work on their 2010 album, Soldier of Love, somewhat spontaneously:

I think the first call was to Stuart, asking him to get together for a couple of weeks. I just wanted to dip my toes into it. I didn’t want the whole huge pressure of “Oh right, we are going to make an album” and what that entails. I didn’t want any expectations, I wanted to do this with no connections with the real music world. (2010)

Matthewman commented that the group has experienced several “false starts,” and rather than forcing new material, they continue to work only if what is emerging feels right: “We’d made a few false starts over the years. Usually, everything starts as a demo, the demos become master (recordings), and we end up staying together if the vibe suits” (2002).

Creative practice: Experimenting with sound

Insulating groups describe themselves as open to stylistic exploration and welcoming the surprises that emerge when experimenting with new aesthetics. As Adu put it, “If you try to get a certain feeling, all you get is contrivance. . . . We have our own feeling and our own sound that comes from many things. . . . We don’t consciously try to make any songs or records that sound like anything or anybody” (1985). Elaborating on this openness to different sounds, Matthewman reflected on how the group would not seek a particular sound ahead of time:

I think our formula is the fact that we don’t really have a formula. That and we all listen to a lot of music. Being a musician and fans of music, we’re obviously influenced by what’s going on, but we never make a conscious decision to go, “Oh we should do a track with more hip-hop,” or, “We should do a track that’s kind of more reggae.” We just do what we do and it comes out in some way. . . . We have no rules in the studio so anyone is, you know, always open to try anything. Whether it’s messing with guitar or reggae bass line or some strange keyboard thing that Andrew might do or snare drums on a song that Sade might want to try. You know we’re open for anything. (2012)

Rather than being oriented toward a particular sound or set of expectations, insulating groups allow in-the-moment feelings to guide the unfolding of their creativity. Whereas absorbing groups tend to be quick to claim a particular genre or style as “their sound,” insulating groups tend to explore different sounds and influences and sometimes defy categorization altogether. As Matthewman explained, “Our music has a lot of soul but I don’t think it’s soul music necessarily. It’s difficult for us to describe it” (1996). The lack of fixation on a sound leaves insulating groups more likely to come back together without expectations and with room to experiment, both of which seem to support long-run outcomes.

Distal outcome: Sustained productivity and better critical reception

Reflecting on the band’s lengthy journey, Adu noted,

We’ve been together for 18 years, so we’ve always got new generations of people discovering our music for the first time. I think what people respect is the fact that we don’t try to do anything but what we do. We don’t try to do anything contemporary. We don’t try to do hip hop or house or whatever. We all love it. They are great influences but [we] just do what we do. (2017)

While the group has taken up to ten years in between albums, Sade has never officially broken up. Their albums have continued to generate critical recognition—music critic Kitty Empire deemed their 2010 album “another triumph for quality over quantity”—and widespread appeal: each album has placed in the Top 10 on Billboard’s album chart. ¹⁰ Throughout these cycles of hiatuses and reunions, insulating groups are better able to remain creatively productive.

Distal outcome: Gratitude moment by moment

While absorbing groups experience late gratitude for their early creative work and seek to recreate their early album, insulating groups exhibit gratitude for their ongoing ability to create. Adu expressed her appreciation for the spontaneous emergence of new ideas: “We were jamming, and I just started to sing. It was a nice vibration, and the words just came into my head from nowhere. I didn’t leave that night feeling, ‘Wow, we’ve got a song,’ but we went back into the studio the next day, and there it was” (2000). She later described, “I feel lucky that we still have that platform and we didn’t just jump and somebody pulled away the net. To continue doing what we do and know that we are loved is a great thing” (2011). Insulating groups exhibit not only appreciation for the present moment but also an excitement about what they can achieve in the future. As Adu said, “It’s that feeling that you can get a little bit better. That there’s somewhere to go and you haven’t expressed it all” (2011).

While absorbing groups tend to indulge external influences, latch onto particular aesthetics, and attend too much to audience opinions in hopes of achieving future recognition, insulating groups bound their relationships by working through one another, deflect expectations that arise from their early recognition, and focus on moving forward. Following early recognition, their practices support creativity by allowing them to remain open to experimentation rather than being wedded to a particular style or set of audience expectations. As we demonstrate further via quantitative data below (in the section “Triangulation and Alternative Explanations”), insulating groups remain productive for a longer period of time, produce more albums, and ultimately receive more recognition over the course of their careers.

Changing course

What enables these bands to break away from certain aspects of the absorbing groups’ experience and have long, productive careers? Mixed groups spoke of a turning point at which they returned from time apart with a new perspective that enabled them to break some of the habits associated with an absorbing orientation. Waaktaar-Savoy delineated three periods in A-ha’s career, beginning with their absorbing turn toward pop music and ending with returning to songwriting as more-seasoned artists:

It feels like we have had three different careers with the crazy teen thing and people living on your doorstep. Then we got fed up of being pop stars and we wanted to do more live shows, so we played live. Then the last part of our career was coming back and finding people at different stages of their life and trying to still make music. (2010)

Furuholmen described it as getting “back to zero”: “I think it’s important that you don’t want to fully embrace this idea of yourself as this famous person. You want to be able to get back to zero and try your hand at challenges that don’t allow you this sense of entitlement” (2019). Lead singer Harket described the need to change their perspective on recognition as “kind of [a] breakdown, but one that you induce yourself, because you’re not willing to carry on the way you are” (2000).

From internalizing to externalizing expectations

Like absorbing groups, mixed groups are initially overly attuned to audiences’ opinions. A-ha continued to seek renewed mainstream recognition: when their 2005 album, Analogue, produced a mainstream hit song in Europe, Waaktaar-Savoy remarked, “Thank you for giving us a top 10. We needed that, badly” (2006). At the same time, they yearned for recognition from a wider audience. A-ha had earned accolades and adulation from their initial pop audience, but they strove to be taken seriously by other groups. Furuholmen explained that after moving into the pop style of music, the group began to feel that their “boy band” image was “too small a suit” for the kind of recognition they sought (2000). Similar to The Go-Go’s, A-ha cared deeply about external validation. When they played to a record-breaking crowd at the 1991 Rock in Rio concert, they received virtually no media coverage, and according to Furuholmen this made the group feel “alienated,”“hopeless,” and “ignored” by the music industry (2009).

Mixed groups attempt to transition away from internalizing expectations toward externalizing their own expectations, with mixed success. Despite record label executives pressuring A-ha to recreate their first hit, the group began to distance themselves from these expectations. Speaking about their later work, Furuholmen noted, “People would say, ‘There’s no ‘Take on Me’ on this record,’ and we’d say, ‘Yeah, great!’ We knew that the expectation was to regurgitate our own success and that wasn’t what we were about” (2009). Waaktaar-Savoy explained how, by the early 2000s, the group was no longer willing to present itself in a certain way to appease others’ expectations: “We were never comfortable with the teenage image that we had before. . . . We should never have done any of that. This time none of that is an issue anymore. It is good in a way” (2000). Yet the group continued to express frustration that they had not been recognized as serious musicians; Furuholmen commented that they grappled “with the fact we felt the music was not given enough credence” (2021).

From opening relationships to bounding relationships

Like absorbing groups, mixed groups also start out by opening their relationships to external influences in an attempt to recapture the magic that prompted their early recognition. Early in A-ha’s career, Furuholmen explained, “I would think it would be very snobbish not to do everything [that we are asked to do by the record label and fans]. We don’t choose to do this or that. Whoever wants us to do it, we’ll do it” (1988). Harket later described realizing that the band had lost sight of its own priorities in those years: “[Y]ou find that you tend to go along with what people want and you don’t really check on things to see if it’s really worth doing and whether you agree that this is the thing to do” (2000). As they allowed new voices to influence their work in hopes of earning more recognition, concomitantly their ability to work with one another suffered (working against versus working through each other). A-ha initially broke up because band members struggled with getting individual credit for their work: “So it wasn’t drugs that broke up the band for the first time, in 1993, but internal tension over the high-stakes decision making and credit-taking that fame brought. ‘Suffice to say that our individual versions of our history together differ wildly,’ Furuholmen sighs” (Financial Times, 2016). ¹¹

As A-ha regrouped, they tried to imagine the band as its own entity: “A-ha is not me, Pål, or Magne, it is its own individual that has its own identity and characteristics. It is a result of a particular meeting point between the three of us” (Harket, 2010). These moments, when the band really felt like a collective, kept the members willing to engage with one another and take on new creative endeavors. In speaking about their 2009 album, Foot of the Mountain, Furuholmen described this sense of collective effort: “[T]he outset was quite exciting, it showed me—proved to me—over the course of three or four songs . . . that we can still do interesting stuff together when we co-write, and we can still add something to each other’s creative process” (2009). Even so, the new sense of a collective was partially fraught with the feeling that individual concerns could reemerge or even be foisted upon the band by external expectations:

It’s very much a three-person effort on every level, and any attempt to write the story differently always kind of bugs me. People do tend to look at it very superficially and then define roles very clearly based on personality or based on what they think they know, and sometimes we do feel very annoyed. (Furuholmen, 2009)

A-ha’s mixed recognition orientation helps to illustrate the dynamic nature of orientations. Though absorbing orientations are sticky, bands can attempt to change them over time. Breakups and other dramatic interactions can signal that they should change their current recognition orientation and answer the question Is this what we want? in a new way. However, bands that attempt to transition often seem to struggle with fully changing; their initial orientation toward recognition seems to leave scars—a shared history of decisions that the band will always have to reckon with. The members of A-ha, for instance, maintain a level of ambivalence toward one another and have come to expect conflict to reemerge in the later stages of their creative process. Furuholmen explained how “high spirits” typically gave way to “everyone . . . lobbing grenades”:

I think the mood got a little more sombre as we got closer to the release of that album, but this is pretty much the case with every album that we’ve done; it starts out with everyone in high spirits, kind of coming out of the trenches waving white flags at each other, and then it tends to end up with everyone kind of lobbing grenades over the edge and getting dug in! (2009)

Harket summarized this tension simply: “We both do and don’t get on. In certain ways we never do, in that we are not cut out the same way. We are very resilient individualists. A decision is usually arrived [at] through exhaustion. We don’t mate easily” (2010) (see also Bechtold, Choi, and Nijstad, 2012). However, the band now tends to deal predominantly with one another instead of having to do so in addition to dealing with the input, demands, and requests of others.

Creative practice: Attempting steady pacing of work

Mixed groups begin like absorbing groups, accelerating their work. A-ha described their work as “chaotic” but “exciting,” including “days and nights” in the studio and feeling a sort of “high” from the work (Furuholmen, 2019). But the drain on energy quickly became apparent, as Harket noted: “We were screwed up. We had no energy left. We realised we were reaching the end of the line. We had to get away from the whole circus and breathe fresh air; become a band again. . . . It would have been a bigger risk not to [take time off]” (1990). Other members of the band conceded that they had grown exhausted and then needed to reorient the band to working together in a different pattern: “I think we sort of run ourselves into the ringer when we get together, that we always need to step back, and I think it’s when we step back that . . . it seems to do our career a lot of good. We have to go away to get better, that’s sort of how it is” (Waaktaar-Savoy, 2015). They described the early, accelerated period as resulting in attempts to “kill off” the band, whereas later they focused on working together at a pace that was “enjoyable”:

Strangely we have tried to kill off A-ha a few times but without success—it just keeps bouncing back at us. This time around we figured it would be nice to do the whole first album as a kind of celebration of 35 years in the band, and let’s do something we haven’t done before. . . . I think we are done with farewell tours. [Laughs] I think we will keep going for as long as any one of us feels like doing it. Right now we enjoy touring together, so that’s what we will do, and if that stops being enjoyable, then I don’t think there is any reason to do it. We have a faithful bond—there’s shared history that follows us around no matter how far we run in any direction. (Furuholmen, 2019)

Notably, this quote highlights that, as with other mixed groups, A-ha reorients to try working together in new ways. Yet they still have a “shared history” that, for better or worse, anchors them to previous choices.

Creative practice: Later experimenting with sound

Mixed groups are somewhat stuck between the push to be more experimental, which often comes with an attempt to be more insulating, and the pull to recreate prior sounds. Harket noted this ambivalence in the sound of A-ha’s albums: “We wanted the freedom to be playful, to experiment and do what we felt like doing, but we were heavily affected by the success that the first record gave us” (2009). In 2000, Furuholmen commented that the band was no longer beholden to their earlier work: “We are not going out for anyone in that way [anymore]. We don’t think like that. We just make our music and we make music that we respond to ourselves.” They even felt that their newer work had moved far enough away from their early sound that it served as an elegy for that prior work: “That album (Memorial Beach, released in 1993) felt like a requiem. It was clear we wanted to get out of the pop business” (Furuholmen, 2009).

Distal outcome: Persistent productivity and qualified critical reception

In general, mixed groups work together for longer periods than absorbing groups but cannot achieve the level of critical success that insulating groups do. The big differentiator for mixed groups is the ability to mend wounds that emerged during their absorbing orientation period, which allows them to have a longer career together. Even so, this extended time working together is marred by echoes of their early absorbing orientation; as they attempt to craft an insulating orientation, aspects of their early history linger, thwarting a complete transition. Waaktaar-Savoy described the difficulty of moving past patterns that inhibited the group’s creativity: “You do get caught up, things get into patterns. . . . It takes away a little bit of that supernatural—where things are sort of allowed to evolve without having anybody influencing us” (2015). Furuholmen commented on the group’s reluctance to embrace its history: “Embracing [recognition] is a big issue in this band. Embracing our history is a big problem. We were always very reluctant pop stars. Reluctance has been part of our history throughout” (2009). Because of these lingering scars, mixed groups’ creative endeavors do not unfold easily, and maintaining creativity calls for a willingness to persist despite these challenges. Furuholmen explained, “It’s taking us four years to make records, and it involves a lot of debate and disagreements, and it’s not always something that comes out feeling like a strong team effort” (2010).

Like the band itself, critics also had difficulty fully moving on from A-ha’s earlier decisions, noting anchors to their older work. Commenting on their ninth album, a critic for The Guardian (2009) wrote,

A-ha have rediscovered the synthesizer, but it’s a bit desperate to claim, as their press release does, that their current sound sits “comfortably alongside the likes of Little Boots and La Roux.”Foot of the Mountain’s core consists of the same grown-up wistfulness that’s powered Barlow and company’s comeback. This sort of thing comes naturally to A-ha, whose 1980s hits were shot through with melancholy; as they reach middle age, they’re simply growing into themselves. ¹²

Distal outcome: Resentment followed by eventual gratitude

Like absorbing groups, mixed orientation groups struggle with feeling pigeonholed by aspects of their early recognition. A-ha expressed that their “boy band” image “can’t be further away from where we came from. We were in a band—different bands—from the time we were 12 years old, we wrote our own material from a very early age. . . . I think that was an unjust image” (Furuholmen, 2000). The group also continued to resent their lack of respect (until later in their career) among serious critics: “Once you were in Smash Hits, the serious music papers immediately discarded you as fluff” (Furuholmen, 2016). This is not to say that they are not proud of their early hit songs; on the contrary, they have come to feel grateful for their early hits. But they are equally proud—if not more so—of their later creative efforts. Harket spoke of the group’s pride in the hit song “Take on Me” and their sense of distance from it as they have moved in new directions: “I don’t regret it—we’re proud of it, but at the same time we’re somewhat disassociated from it because we’ve had a long-standing career of doing a lot of other things since then, which sums up what we are. And it’s just living its life on its own, parallel to us” (2015).

Mixed recognition orientation groups change their response to the question, Is this what we want? Initially they respond like an absorbing group, latching onto audience opinions and benchmarking against their early recognition, but they ultimately find frustration with one another and with this decision. Later they develop a measured appreciation for their “big album.” Ultimately they change their relationship with recognition and look somewhat more like insulating groups, though the challenging early years leave a mark. As we show below, mixed groups remain productive for a period, similar to insulating groups (and greater than absorbing groups), and they produce more albums than absorbing groups yet struggle to receive recognition over the course of their careers.

Triangulation of creative practices: Recreating or experimenting with sound?

Tables 3A and 3B summarize our analyses of the acoustic attributes of bands’ albums after those that received early creative recognition. The former, to control for differences across orientations in band longevity, compares acoustic attributes from just the first two post-Grammy-nominated albums, while the latter compares the attributes among all post-Grammy-nominated albums. The right sides of both tables show that absorbing groups generally produced music with less variety than did insulating and mixed groups, whether we look at only the first two albums released after the Grammy nomination or at the bands’ entire catalogues. Moreover, when we compare variances across all three orientations, we find that insulating groups are significantly different (i.e., they show higher variance) on six (two subsequent albums) and eight (all subsequent albums) of the 12 acoustic attributes, lending further support to our identification of aesthetics as a key difference between groups with different orientations.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Table 3A.

Acoustic Feature Comparison of Variances by Orientation, Songs from First Two Post-Grammy-Nominated Albums*

	Attribute Mean Mean-Centered by Artist †			P-Values from Levene Test of Equality of Variances
Acoustic Attribute	Insulating Groups	Mixed Orientation Groups	Absorbing Groups	All Three Orientations	Insulating Groups vs. Mixed Orientation Groups	Insulating Groups vs. Absorbing Groups	Mixed Orientation Groups vs. Absorbing Groups
Key	2.839	2.697	2.785	.404	.263	.674	.295
Energy	0.173	0.153	0.143	.039 •	.186	.013 •	.181
Liveness	0.165	0.126	0.124	.063 +	.054 +	.03 •	.911
Tempo	21.406	19.900	19.687	.552	.345	.305	.948
Speechiness	0.014	0.022	0.020	.067 +	.035 •	.022 •	.744
Acousticness	0.214	0.190	0.143	.000 •••	.127	.000 •••	.000 •••
Mode	0.368	0.432	0.354	.000 •••	.027 •	.122	.000 •••
Time signature	0.243	0.121	0.142	.003 ••	.002 ••	.006 ••	.627
Song duration	49.774	38.142	38.132	.003 ••	.003 ••	.003 ••	.985
Valence	0.207	0.197	0.172	.002 ••	.45	.003 ••	.007 ••
Danceability	0.108	0.095	0.090	.058 +	.123	.021 •	.36

+

p < .10; ^•p < .05; ^••p < .01; ^•••p < .001.

*

See Online Appendix A for further detail on each acoustic attribute and the data used in this analysis. Following Lim and Loh (1996), we use a median-centered Levene (1960) test, as this is both more powerful and more robust to non-normal distributions in underlying variables. Low p-values indicate a significant difference in variance, e.g., songs vary in their acoustic features across bands with each orientation based on a comparison with their Grammy-nominated album.

†

Each attribute was mean-centered by artist/group based on their Grammy album, their pre-Grammy album, and the first two post-Grammy albums prior to analyses, in order to compare variance within bands’ songs.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Table 3B.

Acoustic Feature Comparison of Variances by Orientation, Songs from All Post-Grammy-Nominated Albums*

	Attribute Mean Mean-Centered by Artist †			P-Values from Levene Test of Equality of Variances
Acoustic Attribute	Insulating Groups	Mixed Orientation Groups	Absorbing Groups	All Three Orientations	Insulating Groups vs. Mixed Orientation Groups	Insulating Groups vs. Absorbing Groups	Mixed Orientation Groups vs. Absorbing Groups
Key	2.742	2.780	2.793	.728	.576	.424	.811
Energy	0.172	0.149	0.151	.000 •••	.000 •••	.000 •••	.979
Liveness	0.159	0.107	0.133	.000 •••	.000 •••	.042 •	.000 •••
Tempo	21.647	21.137	21.210	.804	.53	.579	.943
Speechiness	0.016	0.019	0.023	.000 •••	.144	.000 •••	.016 •
Acousticness	0.233	0.212	0.163	.000 •••	.023 •	.000 •••	.000 •••
Mode	0.378	0.441	0.376	.000 •••	.000 •••	.749	.000 •••
Time signature	0.211	0.176	0.129	.002 ••	.602	.001 ••	.003 ••
Song duration	45.112	44.057	41.309	.262	.713	.128	.201
Valence	0.209	0.197	0.188	.015 •	.085 +	.003 ••	.204
Danceability	0.108	0.100	0.096	.039 •	.115	.009 ••	.303

+

p < .10; ^•p < .05; ^••p < .01; ^•••p < .001.

*

See Online Appendix A for further detail on each acoustic attribute and the data used in this analysis. Following Lim and Loh (1996), we use a median-centered Levene (1960) test, as this is both more powerful and more robust to non-normal distributions in underlying variables. Low p-values indicate a significant difference in variance, e.g., songs vary in their acoustic features across bands with each orientation based on a comparison with their Grammy-nominated album.

†

Each attribute was mean-centered by artist/group based on all released albums (including Grammy album) prior to analyses, in order to compare variance within bands’ songs.

In general, we find that on some of the more standard musical features, specifically key and tempo as well as song duration, in the full catalogue comparison, songs from each orientation tend not to be different from one another. Given the relatively limited set of possibilities for each of these attributes in popular music production, these findings are unsurprising. However, on the more subjective attributes—those that better capture the elements of songs that make them stand out and for which there are many more possible values—insulating groups tend to produce music with greater variance after the recognition of an early album. Comparing orientations pairwise in terms of variance on the acoustic attributes, we find that insulating groups are significantly different from absorbing groups on eight musical attributes (in the first two post-nomination albums) and from mixed groups on four (absorbing and mixed groups are significantly different from each other on three). This triangulates with our qualitative finding that insulating groups experiment more with their sound overall (whereas absorbing groups become locked into a sound) and that mixed groups are initially more like absorbing groups but, over the course of their career, start to become more varied in their sound.

Triangulating distal outcomes: Lower or sustained productivity?

Our emergent theory suggests that absorbing groups work over a shorter period and thereby produce fewer albums (creative output). Moreover, in qualitative terms they describe themselves as experimenting less with their sound and feeling under-recognized (their albums garner less acknowledgment from domain experts, as measured by additional nominations). Given our inductive stance and the small samples of each orientation, our goal was to use quantitative data for triangulation and to enhance the descriptions of the groups. Insulating groups and mixed groups spent more time being productive (i.e., years active) than absorbing groups did (M_Insulating = 19.75, S.D. = 9.24 vs. M_Absorbing = 11.04, S.D. = 6.12 vs. M_Mixed = 19.76, S.D. = 6.82, F[2,49] = 10.45, p < .001, η_p² = .30). A second ANOVA revealed that insulating groups and mixed orientation groups created more original albums than absorbing groups did (M_Insulating = 8.00, S.D. = 3.02 vs. M_Absorbing = 5.26, S.D. = 2.64 vs. M_Mixed = 8.47, S.D. = 2.81, F[2,49] = 8.10, p = .001, η_p² = .25).

Distal outcome: Future recognition?

Though recognition can come in multiple forms, the triggering event for the groups in our data was an early Grammy nomination. As we are interested in how orientations ultimately influence future creative production, we looked at subsequent Grammy nominations for all bands in our sample to see how they fared on this measure of recognition. When we compare the average number of additional Grammy nominations (not including the original year in which they were nominated and not double counting multiple nominations for a single piece of work), insulating groups received 5.13, absorbing groups received 1.85, and mixed orientation groups 1.71. In addition, three insulating bands were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame: Dire Straits, The Pretenders, and Eurythmics. The Go-Go’s are the only group from either of the other orientations that have been nominated or inducted. ¹³

Alternative explanations: Biographic comparisons

Perhaps groups whose members had prior band experience, that were self-formed, whose members were from the same geographical area, that had been together longer before being nominated, or that had fewer members would be better equipped to manage the impact of recognition for early creative success. To help rule out these alternative explanations that might explain why groups exhibited differences in terms of ongoing creativity, we turned to biographic and demographic data.

Using the additional data we collected, we created a dummy for whether individual group members had prior band experience (1 = one or more band members had prior experience; 0 = no band members had prior experience). We measured group formation by determining whether outsiders (primarily record label executives) were described as involved in the group’s formation (1 = outsiders involved; 0 = outsiders not involved). We measured whether group members were from the same geographical area by researching band members individually and creating a dichotomous variable: when group members’ hometowns were within the same part of the country (for large countries) or within the same country (for small countries), we used 1 to indicate hometown proximity (0 = not close). We recorded how long groups had been together prior to their nomination in years based on the difference between when the groups initially formed and when they were nominated. We also recorded the number of group members.

Tables 4 and 5 summarize the biographical comparisons between absorbing, insulating, and mixed groups and reveal that the only significant difference with each orientation is the number of group members, as groups with more members are more likely to be absorbing groups. Considering our qualitative findings, we believe this is likely because it is more difficult to break the behavioral patterns that arise with the challenges prompted by early recognition when there are more group members. With more people involved, more egos need to be handled. Otherwise, we observe no significant differences in these possible alternative explanations across the three orientations. Little, if anything, about bands’ histories appears to play a role in determining which orientation they adopt following early recognition.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Table 4.

Frequencies, Percentages, and Chi-Square Results for Prior Band Experience, Group Formation, and Hometown Proximity by Orientation*

	Prior Experience	Formation	Hometown
Absorbing groups	15/27 (56%)	3/27 (11%)	11/18 (61%)
Insulating groups	6/8 (75%)	1/8 (13%)	2/5 (40%)
Mixed orientation groups	9/17 (53%)	1/17 (6%)	4/4 (100%)
χ2(2)	1.19	0.42	3.51

*

N = 52, except for Hometown, as only groups were included in the analysis (N = 27). None of the Chi-Square tests were significant.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Table 5.

Means, Standard Deviations, and Discriminant Analyses of Years Together Prior to Grammy Nomination and Number of Members by Orientation*

	Absorbing Groups (n = 19)	Insulating Groups (n = 6)	Mixed Orientation Groups (n = 5)	Eigenvalue	Canonical Correlation	χ2(2)
Years together prior to nomination	3.42(1.68)	3.67(0.82)	3.80(2.49)	0.01	0.09	0.24
Number of members	4.26(1.28)	3.50(1.22)	2.80(0.84)	0.24	0.44	5.75 +

+

p < .10.

*

N = 30. Because a majority of solo artists (12) end up in the mixed orientation category, we removed solo artists from the analysis of the number of members so as not to distort the size of the group. Standard deviations are in parentheses.

Group longevity (and lack thereof)

Prevailing theory about groups notes that group breakup, also labeled “adjourning” (Tuckman and Jensen, 1977: 426) or “exit” (Moreland and Levine, 2001: 72), is an important part of the group experience. Yet few studies examine group dissolution; most research examines why individuals leave a group, operating under the assumption that most members remain (O’Reilly, Caldwell, and Barnett, 1989; Jackson et al., 1991). Recognition orientations provide insight into how groups enact longevity, including why groups choose to continue working together or to disband entirely. Moreover, our findings distinguish between varieties of group separation that might otherwise look similar to outside observers: hiatuses inspired by insulation and breakups born from absorption. Our distinction provides deeper insight into whether groups dissolve as an acknowledgment of depleted creative energies or as a last resort.

Recognition orientations also provide a potential resolution to divergent findings regarding group longevity and creativity. While some work suggests that group members need to leave so that new ideas can arrive in the form of new members (Skilton and Dooley, 2010; Soda, Mannucci, and Burt, 2021), other research indicates that groups that sustain longevity can maintain creative productivity (Simonton, 1977, 1997). We show that an absorbing orientation tends to lead groups toward breakup, even if the group is opening its relationships and finding new voices—perhaps even because of that. This discovery suggests that our view of individual turnover in a new group (or adding new members) may not take a sufficiently long perspective. That is, though a new producer might be able to milk another hit out of a band, absorbing outside input and expectations seems to create conditions that trade the future for the present. Hypothetically, if the same band adopted an insulating orientation, they might not produce the immediate hit, but because they continue working through each other and producing music over a longer time, they have the chance to outperform the additional hit that an absorbing orientation might have earned them in the short term. Laying bare the stresses that groups endure as their recognition orientations emerge highlights the reality that creative pressures can break a group. Future research should do more to explore group breakdowns and the long-term consequences for those involved; our data indicate that attempting creativity after a breakup is rife with its own particular challenges that can thwart future efforts.

Gratitude

Creativity scholars have shown great interest in the relationship between creativity and emotions (Baas, De Dreu, and Nijstad, 2008), generally focusing on broad groups of emotions—positive (Amabile et al., 2005), negative (George and Zhou, 2002), or ambivalent (Fong, 2006)—as predictors of creative behavior. We contribute to this line of research by highlighting emotions as an output of, rather than an input to, creativity. Moreover, we build new theory by highlighting the role of a specific emotion: gratitude. When a group receives recognition, the emergent recognition orientation changes the group’s trajectory, leading them to reflect on their work in distinct ways and creating divergent interpretations for the group members to consider. Absorbing groups eventually grow to feel gratitude for past accomplishments, whereas insulating groups express appreciation in the present. With these findings, we begin to crack open the door to interweaving notions of creativity, temporality, and emotion. Early recognition for creativity, if not handled appropriately, may create an emotional longing for the past. This longing appears to restrict the ability to generate new ideas: groups might see the creative process as a restrictive time machine that forces them to try to recreate prior work. In contrast, gratitude for the present seems to encourage groups to appreciate their unique creative process, which creates a willingness to reengage with one another and openness to new ideas and directions.

Taken together, these outcomes provide new opportunities for theorizing about creativity, especially as scholars embrace longer time horizons to capture creativity as an input into groups’ subsequent creative efforts. Gratitude conveys meaning because it is defined as “thankful appreciation” for experiences (Watkins et al., 2003: 432), suggesting that it motivates reflecting on the significance of an experience and thereby serves to anchor the meaning of the experience. The addition of gratitude to longevity and productivity, therefore, offers a new frontier for creativity research—one which Amabile and Pratt (2016) suggested deserves exploration—because it locates meaning not as a motivational input that catalyzes creativity but as an output of creativity that crystallizes its meaning and importance.

Moreover, our findings suggest that gratitude may not be universally beneficial. We distinguish two forms of gratitude: one associated with divergent recognition orientations and the other with divergent long-term outcomes. Whereas absorbing groups’ gratitude for the past is associated with attempts to recreate the source of their early recognition, insulating groups’ moment-by-moment gratitude is tied to protecting their unique creative process and seems to support creative exploration. In this way, our findings on groups’ sustained productivity provide new insight because they hint at two ways that meaning can be derived from the creative experience and potentially serve as an input for subsequent creative cycles (cf. Mannucci, 2017). Insulating groups in particular appear to exhibit a virtuous gratitude–creativity cycle; their gratitude for both how they work together and what they produce appears to catalyze future collaboration and creativity.