"Breaking Point: Why Did These Music Artists Walk Away at the Top of Their Game?"

There are many ways to leave a career: through frustration with the industry, because of conflicts with your band, because you're no longer makin' the hits you once you used to, or maybe, just maybe, you want to try something else.

Yet rare is the case of an artist or group that is able to leave on their own terms. Even rarer are artists who at their creative or commercial apex and just decide to be done with it, leaving their legacy wholly intact. Let's take a moment and celebrate those creative sonic auteurs who managed to walk away from the industry at the top of their game (and, as this list implies conscious choices, artists who passed away at the peak of their powers deserve a list all their own).

Outkast

OUTKAST

While OutKast didn't technically walkout at the top of their game, with their last project being the well-intentioned but ill-suited movie musical "Idlewild", they were still revered as game-changing legends in hip-hop history. After all, 2003's "Sperboxxx/The Love Below" was a megaton-selling, Grammy-swallowing behemoth of pop culture. Yet its very construction -- of a Big Boi solo album and an Andre 3000 solo album packaged together -- showed the divide that was already forming between the Atlanta duo. While Big Boi only got better as a rapper over time, Dre was increasingly less interested in making new OutKast music as he focused on his Cartoon Network TV show and burgeoning film acting career. Although they never formally disbanded, it's pretty clear that the ATLiens are doing just fine developing their own careers. In 2014, OutKast reunited for a summer full of festival dates, but the shows proved divisive, as Big Boi worked up the crowd without fail while some nights it was clear that Dre's heart was not in it (which was a hard pill to swallow given some nights he sounded totally invested). "Idlewild" was a rare kind of multi-million dollar project that only got green-lit because of OutKast's incredible reach and influence. Still, it ended up being the very thing that effectively ended their creative partnership.