What constitutes a sellout?

[CrashBang]

I was wondering what exactly constitutes a sell out, I have a friend that says The Clash aren't punk just because they made the song "Rock the Casbah" (or however you spell it) I think she thinks this just because it's a popular song and ltos of people have probably heard it in their life. So I'm just wondering what exactly is a sellout?

Not to sound offensive but your friend could not be more wrong if she tried. The Clash never ever changed their sound for any other reason than they wanted to. Rock The Casbah was incredibly punk and sent a great message, as did all of their songs
I have an incredible hangup about the term 'sellout'. I have several friends who say this band and that band are sellouts purely because they've heard someone else say it and they've hopped on the bandwagon. It's embarrassing
AFI were always a hardcore punk band then boom! They bring out Decemberunderground and everyone suddenly hates them because they made a conscious choice to grow and change as a band. Granted that album does suck, but their newest album, Crash Love, is a great album. They are not sellouts for trying something different
I'm generally not a big fan of people throwing the sellout accusation to bands purely because they moved away from their roots and fancied a change of style

 

[Sexual Harassment Panda]

I see what you're saying, but I don't think that changing is selling out. At some point you're going to have to change or you'll get bored or just become irrelevent...does anyone still buy ACDC albums?

I think you need to be preachy and establish and then contradict ethics rather than styles to sell out.

I'll give a shitty example. Some new band, we'll call them..."Curbstomp", who are obviously a punk band(apologies if there is a curbstomp). Curbstomp say that they'll "never make a music video, music video's are ruining music". If you see Curbstomp on MTV, I think you'd be very accurate in labelling them sellouts. If they decided they wanted to make a jazz album, I don't really see that as selling out...

Hey, I love AC/DC, I went to their live show this year

The problem with your example is that a Jazz album won't make more money, missing the final step of my explanation. Let's use Panic! At The Disco as a real world example for what you're saying. They released one album that was popular with emo/scene kids pretty well, sold quite a bit,then their second album was pretty much just them trying to be the Beatles. And it sucked. They changed, but you can't call them a sellout because they didn't become more popular, mainstream and rich.

The only style you can change to in order to sell out is to become more mainstream in order to gain popularity (i.e. money). That is what selling out is.

Ergh. This requires so much assumption of intention that it just feels silly. How do you know that a band isn't just making an album they want to make, and the money and fame are incidental?

 

[Layz92]

At 3:42 is my opinion pretty much


In addition to that it is sad to see a band you like change to something less likable to you but it's a band's choice to play music they find more appealing to them or others. Everyone would get bored after a while of playing the same identical sounding music for years.