Abstract
We advance the veteran’s trap as a phenomenon occurring in segmented markets, where audience members praise both commitment and originality. In such markets, a producer who has developed a focused identity through repeated membership claims to a social category faces performance losses not only in reducing her focus - as prior literature has argued - but also in increasing her focus. Avoiding the discounts of diversification does not prevent the producer from being perceived as increasingly worn by audience members, and from experiencing decreasing returns. Our paper explores the structural antecedents and the performance consequences of the veteran's trap, by tracking the discographies of electronic music artists between 1978 and 2013.