Most misblamed things for career collapses

Todd touched on this in his Arrested Development Trainwreckord video. The common blame for AD's downfall is just that their style of hip hop went out of fashion and culture moved past it. Except Todd notes there were similar successes after that album came out and there's more to it than that. Honestly I think the real thing that put the final nail in the coffin of an AD comeback is the TV show. It deassociated the term from them and led to their obscurity continuing.

The other notable example that gets tossed around is Winger, who often scapegoat Beavis and Butthead for ruining their career. There's a couple key problems with this though:

• Beavis and Butthead didn't premier until 1993. Hair metal was already well on its way out by then. Todd refers to this and similar example as "Nirvana killed my career"...the impact was already felt well before Beavis and Butthead aired.
• Beavis and Butthead roasted many artists and bands who were mostly unscathed career wise. Pavement's indie superstar status was hardly affected by their rather brutal commentary on one of their videos (Stating "This is just horrible." and "These guys are so lazy they probably take a dump in the tub.") Beavis and Butthead also roasted a bunch of metal bands who remained popular.
• Beavis and Butthead actually never even roasted a Winger video. They did make fun of Winger in comments on other videos, leading to their label getting pissed and demanding to MTV that any mockery of Winger stop. So this did technically...except Mike Judge got around it by having the character Stewart intended as a laughing stock wear a Winger shirt. Didn't help Winger's reputation but at that point any hair metal band was already seen as a joke.

I also think the scapegoating of Marilyn Manson for Columbine often cited as what ended his mainstream superstardom is also off. Manson's appeal was actually primarily based on rebellion and teenagers wanting to piss off their parents so that if anything should've helped boost his success. The real cause of his decline I think was that actually balance the opposite happened to his image: he wasn't edgy enough. Mechanical Animals was a huge commercial success and a hit with fans, but it also involved him promoting it and its videos making appearances on TRL alongside the Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears. That definitely had to blunt the edgelordness at least a tad. Follow that up with the decline of nu-metal, a genre he wasn't really a part of but was generally considered at least adjacent to, as well as that his early 21st century albums were so poorly received, and it should shock no one his popularity went into the tank and this would've happened Columbine or not.