Music has always been something that brings people together. A source of enjoyment that allows people to form a collective identity around shared love for an artist. But is there a conflict between collective and personal identity in the modern celebrity era?
An example of this is Taylor Swift’s fanbase, who took to organically buying beads to make friendship bracelets for other fans at concerts. This also acted as a vehicle to visually establish themselves as part of her collective fanbase. On a deeper level, however, this highlights the ways in which fan culture is built around spending: to have not invested in beads is to not participate in fan culture. Additionally, this could also be a vehicle for revealing how artists view their fans, highlighted by Swift’s comment that she “should have invested in beads” on The Graham Norton Show. Despite being passed off as a joke, this emphasises the transactional relationship that exists between artists and listeners, and how their spending potential is prioritised.
Furthermore, artists themselves create a multitude of additional opportunities for spending targeted at their fans. For instance, exclusive opportunities such as VIP tickets and meet and greets are accessed through extra payments, and opportunities to buy the same item in different variants. These are all unscrupulously pushed towards fans.
As well as this, musicians do little to intervene when this often spirals out of control, with fans aiming to, for example, attend every show and collect every piece of merchandise. Although the fanbase itself appears to generate this exploitative transactional discourse, it is the artists themselves who continue to create opportunities to engage via wealth. This highlights the nature of what it means to be a fan today and the exploitative nature of this.
Furthermore, the ticketing and events industry has created the phenomenon of dynamic pricing – meaning higher interest for tickets equates to higher pricing. This means that only those willing to pay the most can come out on top of this ‘ticketing war’, thus leaving the fanbase to comprise only those who can afford the highest prices. Therefore, it would seem that fan culture, in itself, is shaped by consumerism and a willingness to spend money.
Thus, modern fan culture is made exploitative by numerous elements of the music industry, all combining in order to view the fan as a consumer, rather than an individual. Specifically, fan culture is made exploitative by multiple industries, all aimed at pushing individuals to spend more money in order to assert their identity as fans. Although a multitude of elements play a part in this characterisation, it is musicians who drive the discourse and do little to intervene. This indicates the exploitative nature of modern fan culture.
Are you still a fan?
Image by Sally-Marie Bohm on Unsplash