No More Superstars

Social media and streaming have changed the nature of fame and the fundamental economics of music.

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Lil Nas X’s single, Montero (Call Me By Your name), was never really about the music. It was all just the pretext for one of the most complex, masterful acts of online trolling the internet has ever witnessed. Everything about the song and its campaign was made to provoke a reaction: the song’s music video features a thousand-mile pole slide from heaven into the fiery depths of hell where Lil Nas X proceeds to give Satan a lap dance, for promotion, Lil Nas X sold six hundred and sixty six pairs of “satan shoes” that allegedly contain drops of human blood, and on and on. 

Predictably, everyone from the Governor of South Dakota to culturally conservative “intellectuals” weighed in to express their dismay. And Lil Nas X made mincemeat of their tired, 80’s-style pearl clutching by responding to them on twitter with precise and satisfying jabs. 

In a smart piece for The New York Times, pop music critic Jon Carmanaica tracked the contours of Lil Nas X’s hypermind trolling, writing “what ‘Montero’ has caused — or rather, what Lil Nas X has engineered — is a good old-fashioned moral panic. The true art here isn’t the music . . . or the video: it’s the effortlessness, the ease, the joy of his reactions to the reactions. It’s the sense that he is playing chess to everyone else’s lame checkers moves — he is simply faster, funnier and on firmer, more principled ground than his adversaries, who are at best, comically flimsy.” 

Lil Nas X is a prodigy at navigating the various realms of the internet. As he responded to the controversy inspired by his single, he shifted his style according to each social media platform he used to maximize engagement. Each required their own distinct affect and style. On Twitter, his trolling took on quippy and coy forms, responding to homophobic and hyperbolic comments on his song and video with terse and sardonic retorts. 

But on Tik Tok he shifted his affect while maintaining a consistent sense of humor. Translating his responses to video and decentering the backlash to his work, he turned his profile into a wider meme by pairing his song with discordant videos. For example, he reposted an animation of Carl, a character from the popular early 2000s children’s show Jimmy Neutron, singing his lude song while sliding down the pole to hell. These subtle yet important distinctions in how Lil Nas X executed his social media blitz across platforms reveals the delicately drawn details that distinguish respective platforms. Twitter, which functions off text-based engagement, rewards direct conflict that generate other textual responses. Tik Tok, which is more siloed and less of a communal conversation than Twitter, rewards short, fast, funny and surprising videos that generate response via comments, the re-use of the audio featured on a Tik Tok in videos made by other users, and through direct sharing with friends. 

The art of orchestrating controversy and profiting from it has a rich history in the American context, from Andy Warhol’s art-persona to the Kardashian’s public melodrama. But there is something distinct about Lil Nas X’s controversy-art in that his public maneuvers were mediated exclusively through social media. Just as TV changed the pace and tenor of public narrative formulation, social media represents a move towards a decentralized and thus shifty form of disseminating narratives through networks. What’s striking about the dynamic of a media blitz done via social media is that the focal points of power are algorithmic not editorial. With social media, editors in a room are not shaping how the public receives narrative, instead, algorithms are nudging those involved in an emergent public narrative to behave in certain ways. On Twitter, the algorithm disseminates content exponentially through networks based on how much of a reaction it provokes. And thus, the algorithm lets Lil Nas X know through implicit signals that on its platform, it favors the curt and provocative.

The necessity for artists to vibe accordingly with the platforms they use displays the dialectic relationship of control that exists between artists and social media platforms. Lil Nas X is a master at spreading his work and ideas through social media channels, but looked at from an askance view, social media platforms are equally adept at shaping the contours of Lil Nas X’s strategy. They own the rails, and while Lil Nas X, his label and team have built themselves an exceptionally efficient train, they still must drive along a track.

The influence that algorithms have in shaping the behavior of popular, public figures beckons the question: what does popularity mean in an algorithmically driven culture? And how does the power that public figures have to be both discordant and in line with the prioritized modes of behavior on platforms define their influence? A key metric of determining popularity in this framework, could be the extent to which a figure can stray from the algorithmically preferred mode of being. And inversely, a complete reliance on those modes of algorithmically-informed behaviors may determine a contingent popularity that largely exists because of a few major platforms.

Popularity, or superstardom, is at the very core of the American musical imaginary. Thus, recent changes to the nature of fame strike at the core of the music industry’s foundational myths. Fictitious stories like A Star is Born, or real and then narrativized ones like those surrounding Alanis Morisette’s Jagged Little Pill, and N.W.A.'s meteoric rise all contribute to the foundational story of a scrappy talent being scooped by a major who, empowered by greed and gusto, pour millions of dollars into the process of making a given person “a star.” But in recent years, you may have noticed a subtle diminishment of this dynamic. I’m 21 and I remember clearly the world telling me certain groups and artists are “a thing:” One Direction on the Today Show, the internet being flooded with the music and visual mania of Tyler, the Creator and Odd Future, Lady Gaga and her escalating public escapades. Now of course, new huge pop stars exist today. But how many? And how did they reach us? Billie Eilish comes to mind. So does Olivia Rodrigo. Roddy Rich. Lil Nas X. Doja Cat. And while millions have been poured into these acts to support their ascendant stardom, you would not be wrong to feel, on some culturally instinctual level, that there is something less enshrined about these stars’ profile compared to say, Britney at the height of the cultural mania surrounding her.

And this is all because of a very fundamental economic reality: the major labels, in conjunction with streaming platforms like Spotify, have realized that they don’t make their money on new music anymore. It’s a fact so simple and so daunting that it’s almost hard to grasp. In the popular imagination, the music industry is the new music industry; the A&R finding the new undiscovered talent is simply what the industry does. And it still does. But the economics of streaming have shifted the fundamentals of the industry to such a degree that newness, hotness, stardom are all qualities that have taken on far less importance in recent years.

That’s because today, music is almost completely a digital commodity. And it's accessible ad infinitum once you’ve paid your measly fee to Spotify or Apple Music. That means that labels are no longer fighting for limited shelf space in a record store, but rather are fighting for your attention in the form of getting you to stream their artists. And they don’t care if you’re listening to music that’s one year old or 10 years old; if it’s theirs, they are making money when you stream. Their financial center is not a single purchase, but a continuous and amorphous stream. And thus novelty fades away as a central factor in their business plans.

This is all bolstered by the fact that “catalog,” defined as music just 2 years or older, accounts for 75% of music streams (all of this is explored in stunning detail by Jaimie Brooks here). In a 2014 email acquired by Wikileaks sent from consultant Dave Goldberg to Sony Entertainment CEO Michael Lynton, Goldberg lays out the new fundamentals of the music industry in striking candor. Allow me the space to include much of it because its clarity is striking, helpful and scary. He says:

“Music is becoming a purely digital product. Catalog provides 50% of the revenue and 200% of the profits of recorded music. Streaming revenues tend to be more heavily weighted to catalog. Pandora and Spotify are probably 65% catalog under this definition. Licensing and synch revenue (i.e. licensing songs to be used in advertisements, film, or television) are mostly catalog as well. Thus, if the new release business is oriented towards building new deep catalog, it changes the entire process from trying to pick big hits to safely getting some good music out that has longevity.” 

And then the kicker,

“With catalog providing the base profits, new releases need to be cut back dramatically to the point where the new business either breaks even or loses a small amount of money. The record company needs to act like a music publisher for new releases- putting up very little money but not trying to hold artists for long contract periods or to keep as much of the revenue.”

It is now the primary interest of labels to build catalogs, not to build the next big thing, though a huge star once in a while doesn’t hurt. They’re not compelling you to buy a product, but stream and stream and stream. So just as Spotify and streaming platforms incentivize listening to music that’s good for the background, so too are labels whose incentives in many ways align with streaming platforms. And that huge new thing everyone is obsessed with is not background music per se. Yes there’s the idea of the perennially ambient pop song playing in the mall, but on average: stanning requires attention. And the music industry and streaming platforms are not invested in capturing your attention on music, but having that music streamed mindlessly in the background. So their marketing and A&R budgets have shifted, per Goldberg’s idea, accordingly.

Which brings us back to Lil Nas X and social media. With the diminishment of the industry-enshrined pop star, it becomes necessary for artists to be their own marketing machines. And the rate at which new huge pop stars are also incredibly “good” at social media proves that relationship true. The fact that Doja Cat is good at posting and also happens to be the biggest star in the world right now may seem like an inevitable correlation, but it’s actually quite recent that this skill became a near-requirement for contemporary musical stardom.

I worry that a lack of willingness on the part of labels to market artists makes this reliance mandatory and thus the behavior of artists becomes almost completely governed by the gravity of platforms. When Goldstein said that labels need to “act like a music publisher for new releases- putting up very little money,” that translates to investing in what’s already hot. And what’s already hot is surely whatever is doing well on social media. Thus what dictates investment by labels is not music or creativity per se, but a narrow set of skills pertaining to platforms with very specific favored qualities. Now this is obviously not a particularly new dynamic; labels always have invested in what’s hot and they generally exist to extract the maximum amount of value that they can from artists. But what is new is the specificity in which this one specific skill, social media marketing, has become the most centrally favored quality for labels. 

All this means a further entrenchment of the incentives set by algorithmic technology. It is the creation of a feedback loop between technology companies and labels where the labels use the metrics determined by the tech companies to make their investment, without ever questioning the underlying technology that shapes those metrics. With every small decision like this, those qualities that platforms prefer like being provocative on Twitter or ironic on Tik Tok or aesthetically desirable on Instagram, entrench themselves in our culture.

So if this is what’s required to be famous in music today, what then is the status of fame? One could argue that fame today, across disciplines but specifically in music, is merely an aftereffect of an algorithmic culture which is entirely determined by a few humongous tech firms. Now maybe that’s okay and the old way, where fame was made real almost by dictum by entertainment conglomerates, was no better. But the decentralized way that fame can now emerge means that algorithmic culture and the incentives it sets works as almost a filter across our entire culture. Silently, unknowingly, shaping behavior like an invisible hand.

And for the many, many artists out there who may want to lessen the grasp of that translucent claw, they may only have one path: which is through it. They must post and post and gain such a following that they no longer need to contort themselves to the desires of the algorithm. Finally they will become so known and watched that they can change the conversation online despite them not optimizing every online action for platforms. And they must simultaneously produce music that becomes profitable catalog, with sustaining and sustainable revenue.

I think Lil Nas X will get to that point, and maybe he already has. And I think the joy and ease in which he uses social media is something to marvel at. But I think we should all be attuned to the stealthy, silent ways in which rises like Lil Nas X’s and all those that come to fame via social media are empowered and completely shaped by the incentives set by algorithms. They set the stage, whether we like it or not. And I think we need to say that aloud so we can at least grapple with what that means.