I think there are two key types of musical artists (actually this is true of a number of forms of art): innovators and refiners. I've brought this up before in terms of the classic Radiohead/Coldplay debate. Radiohead is an innovator in the purest sense: a lot of ideas, many of them sounding a bit unfinished, and at least some stuff that's a complete miss and some stuff that at least a few people (and sometimes a great many people) will find brilliant. Coldplay has an idiom - guitar and keyboard dominated british pop - that they stick to pretty religiously and attempt to produce the best pop-songs possible with that. And they're successful at it. But they're a diametric opposite to Radiohead in what they're attempting to do. Most musicians aren't one or the other. You can think of it as a scale along which every musical artist fits. One isn't superior to the other, and musical progress sort of needs both: the innovators to go ahead and forge new ground and then the refiners to come along and fill in the gaps. In my music collection, I'd consider bands like Hold Steady, The National, Peter Gabriel, Suzanne Vega, Wilco, and Ben Folds to be very good refiners; while Flaming Lips, Modest Mouse, LCD Soundsystem, Pixies, Nick Cave, and Tom Waits would be some of the better innovators. Anyway, I think that refiners are sometimes called formulaic, and unfortunately that sort of detracts from the complexity or importance of what they're trying to accomplish.
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