Four Pop Music Trends I'd like to See Retired

Once record companies find a successful idea in pop music, they'll try to milk that cash cow by doing it over and over. This gets pretty stale, in my opinion.

So here is a list of worn-out pop music trends I'd like to see retired.

1. Tribute albums by various artists: This was a good idea at first: artists of all types (and sometimes from different genres) pay tribute to a famous artist by recording a CD of cover versions of his or her songs. There have been a number of worthy tribute CDs recorded to great artists: Bob Dylan, Hank Wiliams, and Bruce Springsteen, to name a few.

But the concept has just been done to death. Some artists now have two or more tribute records devoted to them, and the results can be very uneven. Some of the pop music tribute CDs are homages to artists that aren't all that legendary. Can't we just give well-loved pop music icons a gold watch or a tribute concert instead of recording yet another tribute CD?

2. Genre-mixing tribute albums: Yeah, you've probably chuckled at some of these: a bluegrass tribute to AC/DC, a reggae version of Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon," a smooth-jazz tribute to Bob Marley. Some of these-such as a bluegrass tribute to the Eagles-can actually be a good mix of styles, and entertaining pop music to boot. (The Eagles were a great country rock band in their early days, and even had a banjo player on their first couple of albums.) But some of the genres that are being combined in these CDs (like the ones mentioned above) are so bizarre that they sound like parody CDs that you'd give as a gag gift at your company's Secret Santa party. They're a pop music train wreck, plain and simple.