Originally Posted by bogey_j

Okay, shelf-life is a bad term to describe what I'm talking about. But how many albums does it take before a band or an artist starts to fall off artistically?

IMO, I feel an artist usually says everything they had to say with their first 3 albums. After that the quality of their music starts to drop by either repeating themselves, or experimenting for the sake of experimenting and failing at it. But this doesn't really apply to any band before 1975, because back then the top bands used to put out albums every 6 months, so its hard to say..