Justin Timberlake, Jennifer Lopez and the Challenge of Aging a Pop Career Gracefully

variety.com:

Jem Aswad Executive Editor, Music Fifty may be the new forty in some areas of life, but popular music isn’t one of them. With very few exceptions, pop musicians make their most vital work in their twenties and early thirties, and even if they continue to perform to sold-out arenas into their eighties, as the Rolling Stones have, the fans are largely indifferent to their new music and just want to hear the hits — leading to the seemingly counterintuitive situation of artists with sold-out tours connected to new albums that are, comparatively anyway, flops.

Yet the level of ambition and ego required to reach the top in the first place rarely fades with age, and those artists’ desire/ desperation to remain relevant can reach cringeworthy levels — especially in the ‘80s, when the Stones, David Bowie, Paul McCartney, Elton John, Bruce Springsteen and even Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen tried (or were persuaded) to remain contemporary with now-horrifically dated production techniques.

Even those who’ve tried to continue innovating — the Stones with the early-Prince-flavored “Emotional Rescue” and the dub-inflections of “Undercover,” Bowie’s ill-advised explorations of industrial and drum n’ bass in the ‘90s — eventually realized that’s not what their fans wanted and reverted to some form of their former selves, usually with lucrative results.

That’s the common model now: At the top of the spectrum, many of the above-mentioned artists enjoy a comfortable lifestyle of multimillion-dollar-grossing greatest-hits tours in arenas and stadiums, with the new material serving as a bathroom break for the audience.