Every genre of music has people downloading it for free. So WTF are you talking about? And Beyonce's 4 sold the average of what a 'hit' album sells these days. The only thing about it that "underperformed" were the singles, but since the whole point of singles is to promote and sell the album they're from, that ultimately means little since the album still sold to what the industry would consider successful now.

Anyway, I agree with those who say that R&B artists should stay in their lane and reiterate that any artist who alienates their core fan base to appeal to more mainstream taste is playing with fire. Fans of pop and dance music are A LOT more fickle than fans of R&B. Fans of R&B today loved it 10 years ago and will still love it 10 years from now. Fans dance and pop music today were into something else 10 years ago and will be into something else 10 years from now. There's little everlasting loyalty with pop fans the way there tends to be with R&B, hip-hop, rock and country, because it panders too heavily to flaky suburbanite teenagers with roving interests and who're more easily manipulated by the corporate machine tells them is hot right now.

Any R&B act who jumps on the dance train will most likely be sorry for doing that in a few years when they have no audience of any genre left after the dance fans morph into something else and the R&B fans wash their hands of them for turning traitor.