You may have noticed this when Doja Cat left her fan base this summer. You may have noticed this when Charli XCX called out one of her fans on Twitter last year. Or maybe you noticed it when a campaign calling for Taylor Swift to break up with Matty Healy began circulating online this spring. When did superfans become such a headache? Sometimes literally So, just ask Bebe Rexha, who was hit in the face with a thrown phone at her own concert. This year in the fandom, the call came from inside the house.
Armies of fans and diehard fans have been helping their favorite artists rise to the top of the charts and protecting their reputations for years – if you publicly criticize Nicki Minaj, even witness protection probably can’t save you from her Barbz at this point. . But what these fans expect in return has become increasingly acute as they wield more and more influence, forcing artists to do everything from removing embarrassing lyrics to releasing alternate versions of songs or music videos. When even Beyoncé makes handling fan complaints part of his tour, you know it’s getting annoying.
Let’s start with Doja Cat: In July, the “Paint the Town Red” rapper disavowed the “Kittenz” moniker that many of her fans organized under in a since-deleted thread: “My fans don’t call themselves shit. If you call yourself a “kitten” or a damn “kitten” it means you need to get off your phone, get a job and help your parents around the house.” When a fan pointed out that Doja had chosen “kitten” as her nickname years ago, the singer hilariously responded, “When I was a teenage alcoholic.”
Doja’s outburst may have stemmed from legitimate frustration—her new music openly grapples with the pressures of superstardom and rejects the glossiness of 2021 pop. Planet She. (In the past, she’s also happily embraced being a troll and gone out of her way to ruffle feathers at times.) But for her fans, who cheered her on as she went from internet newbie to legitimate hitmaker, it must have felt like a slap in the face. According to data provided by Instagram Billboard, the turmoil cost Dodge nearly a quarter of a million subscribers in one weekend. One of her Instagram fan accounts, Doja Cat Brazil, almost refused to cover her. And while none of this has in any way derailed her career—she still has about 24 million other followers, and “Paint the Town Red” is still No. 1—the disruption underscored the artist-fan dynamic that has become the norm: Fans work for free to further the careers of their favorite artists, and in return they expect to be rewarded with at least recognition and appreciation.
Stans today “treat themselves as employees” of their favorite artist, says songwriter AJ Marks, who moderates the Popheads subreddit and hosts The main girl from the capsule podcasts. Now consider that fans are getting “younger and younger,” Marks adds, even as pandemic isolation has warped our online relationships, and you’re starting to see new levels of fan rights. “‘I want to talk to your manager,’ kind of like the ‘Karen’ archetype—it permeates pop music a lot,” Marks says.
“Fan culture has its rights, but the savviest and most successful artists know it and step up—just look at Taylor Swift.”
Electro-pop auteur Charli XCX has amassed one of pop music’s tightest-knit fan communities, one that has transformed her from a cult favorite into a bona fide commercial force over the last decade. But in recent years, she has realized that open dialogue with fans can have its consequences.
When Charli began her 2019 tour, “a wave of negative tweets flooded my notifications after I posted the setlist,” the anonymous creator of @FckyeahCharli, a Charli XCX fan account, told Bustle. According to them, “this barrage of hurtful comments reached Charlie.” Last year, when the singer released her album Crashes, she publicly struggled with how fans shared her creative choices. “I feel like I can’t do anything right.” she wrote on, the site formerly known as Twitter. “I really try my best and work as hard as I can.” A few days later, when a fan on Twitter called her a “mother”—which was actually a term of endearment! — she went to the defense: “If you want to have a midlife crisis, damn it, throw it at me.” The real twist: Crashes eventually became her most commercially successful album and enjoys great popularity among fandom.
“What makes a stan a stan is that they are loud, opinionated, very knowledgeable and very concerned about the artist,” says one industry executive with a background in advertising, digital marketing and management, who notes that superfans are often “the first people I look to” to find out reaction to the artist’s work. . “But they don’t stay behind the scenes at that time. They don’t see the little things. They just don’t always have the full picture, so sometimes you have to take what they say with a grain of salt.”
With all the drama unfolding online, it’s perhaps no surprise that things get heated when fans walk into the room with their favorites. Bebe Rexha’s attacker thought it would be ‘funny’ to throw a phone at her; Kelsea Ballerini was hit in the head something like a gift for a fan thrown on stage; and although she was not physically harmed, Pink seemed very disturbed by a fan who threw a family member’s ashes on stage.
“I wonder how much of this behavior is because fans feel disrespected or resentful towards the artist, either because they don’t think their show is trying hard enough, or because the artist isn’t giving enough back to their fans,” he asks Telegraph music editor Eleanor Halls, who also writes and co-hosts the pop culture newsletter Pass the Aux Straight up podcasts. “Fan culture has its rights, but the savviest and most successful artists know this and step up – just look at Taylor Swift, who puts in exhausting efforts to please her fans, from Easter egg hunts and great shows to constant repetition.” . -releases and bonus tracks. I can’t imagine anyone throwing anything at her during one of her performances.”
“There’s a whole general public that doesn’t even know what could happen. They listen to music.”
But even in Swift’s world, no good deed goes unpunished: for some fans, these endless offers of merchandise and vinyl records are simply a “shameless money grab.” And then there are all the reviews about her personal life. Swift’s brief alleged relationship with The 1975’s Matty Healy earlier this year prompted Swifties to write a slew of screeds about how his recent comments in interviews seem inconsistent with her – and their – values. (He apologizes sincerely.) For an artist who’s made a career out of turning her romantic life into songwriting gold, putting pressure on who she should and shouldn’t date interferes with the very thing that makes someone a fan in the first place: art created from life experiences, good and bad. Swift and Healy were reported to have broken up after just weeks of dating, and many media outlets suspected that Healy’s differences played a role in the split.
“It’s kind of weird, middle-of-the-road,” Marks said of fandom artists in general. “People want to believe that (artists) are trying their best to do something for them, but they need to know that artists are doing it for themselves.”
So what does a superstar do when fans pick on him? Nothing more than a soldier. “You don’t have to answer everything,” says an industry insider, in part because stans don’t represent an artist’s entire listener base anyway. “You might get the impression that (they do this) because they are the first to respond to tweets or Instagram posts. These are the ones who are in the artist’s DMs, so they are incredibly visible.” But these superfans may only represent a fraction of Spotify’s millions of monthly listeners. “You can’t forget that there is a whole general public that doesn’t even know a damn thing about what could happen. They listen to music.”
And if they really want to say something, admitting their decision without apologizing has its own power. In a Notes app post earlier this year, Miley Cyrus defended her decision not to tour after her highly successful performance. Endless summer holidays album. “Even if I don’t see them face to face every night at the concert, my fans have a deep feeling in my heart,” she wrote. “I just don’t want to sleep on a moving bus. This is not what is best for me NOW.”
According to Marks, with pop stardom of this magnitude, winning the approval of fans every time is simply impossible – and artists should not try to do it: “You can’t win over everyone. So you’ll just have to make your own career decisions.” Does all this money make it easier to resist retaliation? Maybe. But Marks says that in some cases, fans overestimate the power that pop stars actually have. In the era of streaming and social media, it is much easier to become famous than to get rich.
“I’ve talked to too many famous people to know that this method has many advantages, but there are also many disadvantages. I think a lot of people think that fame is synonymous with wealth, but this is often not the case. You’re just famous, but you’re not really rich… And then everyone just hates you.”