I disagree with a few of the mainstream rock bands you mentioned, who might have a bunch of similar albums but wouldn’t be as popular without the one that made them big or a later album that kept their career going. In order of how confident I am that removing certain albums change their career alot:

Aerosmith- I think that even though fans like Rocks as much a Toys in the Attic, it’s not as big a hit if Toys doesn’t come first, and that was their break. The hits from their first two albums only became retroactively popular. Rocks could be successful on it’s own, but to a lesser extent, they wouldn’t the big American band of the era.

I guess that, although it wouldn’t have happened in real life without them being so big in the 70s, the 80s comeback albums would still have been big without the Hair Metal crowd. If you subtract either one the other one still works, and Get A Grip is probably still a huge hit without either one of those albums. The albums after that don’t matter too much, but they don’t keep getting treated as a “current band” by the media through the ’90s without Get a Grip. So I think losing Toys in the Attic or Get a Grip hurts their career alot, although they’re still hugely famous and successful.

Tom Petty: Damn the Torpedoes has the most hits, sells the best of anything in the first 12 years, and is only his third album. If you imagine his greatest hits without those songs it might feel that different, but his career might have needed an album that stacked at that time.

Then without Full Moon Fever in 1989 his career might run out of momentum at that point. Like Aerosmith, he get’s treated like a current artist well into the ’90s. As a kid I was award of him as someone putting out music and didn’t think of him as being old and from another era.

Only the first two Black Crows albums are really popular, and the first sells more than twice as well as the second. Maybe Southern Harmony has the same effect if it gets to come first, I don’t know. You can just say that the 90s only had room for so much of that stuff, but the third album, Amorica, doesn’t have viable singles.