More from the article...

... But it might just be critics saying that. That's according to a new study that discovered that the sophomore slump effect"where a band's second album is exceptionally bad compared to their first and third records"only crops up among professional critics, not fans.

"If every music critic has heard of a sophomore slump and everyone knows it happens, they might be convinced to over-apply it in their reviews," said Gregory Webster, Ph.D., the R. David Thomas Endowed Professor of Psychology at the University of Florida and co-author of the new study in the journal Psychology of Music. "We suspect it's a kind of social conformity, which we see in a lot of social groups." ...