Someone in GD made a post asking people to name a better R&B debut since Toni Braxtons, and very few candidates really stand out. I think that there has always been a structure that most artists are good singles makers, and a select few are album makers, and everyone is cool with that. But I think that in the late 80s/early 90s producers slowly became more important than songwriters, and a good album became even less of a priority.

Even in cold, economic terms that is a failing strategy, because even if you look at an album as not art but a product, R&B stars started giving us bad product, overloading CDs with 18 songs and unimaginative album covers and music videos, basically phoning in every release. And if the artists are being cynical, it just slowly disengaged the consumer. The 1996 telecommunications act surely should deserve alot of blame, because that consolidation closed down the black music departments of record labels, but the question was never asked: WHY did they do that? WHY was R&B costing record labels so much money when they made them so much in the 60s and 70s?

I think the lack of dependable, bankable stars who could give the public memorable singles and iconic albums really made R&B seem disposible in the minds of the label heads AND the listener. Those three things --Stars, Singles and Albums act as tent-poles that the rest of a genre or culture can eat and grow under. And by the time the Industry got stabbed by the internet, the entire structure was gone and fragmented, leaving singers to make dance pop and rehashed Hip Hop Soul singles. People like to blame Hip Hop for R&B's artistic decline in the 90s, but I think if star singers back then mimicked not aesthetics but rappers imaginative, experimental approaches to making classic albums like The Chronic, Southernplayaistic, Only Built and others, then the genre would be seen in a better light, economically and artistic-wise.