Charli XCX is your favourite reference, baby.

 

The UCL Alum of the Year’s (she dropped out of Slade School of Fine Art) new album was seemingly everywhere. Chartreuse green squares bombarded my feed this whole summer.  Everyone was doing the Apple dance. Everytime I see something remotely light green, that low resolution, Arial font word pops into my head like a B-list horror movie jumpscare.

 

But if you were to look at the numbers, you would not really think so. Despite the album’s seeming cultural omnipresence, none of its singles reached the top 10 on the Billboard Hot 100.¹ It debuted and peaked at No.3 on the Billboard 200 and No. 2 in the UK.² And although that is quite impressive by all means, it just feels like its cultural impact is, bigger, you know? An album that is practically the de-facto soundtrack to a US presidential candidate’s campaign feels like it should be topping charts everywhere. But its success has felt very  modest… demure, even.

 

In the context of these figures, I have also recently been thinking about this question I overheard on a podcast: “Will there ever be a future popstar big enough to play at the SuperBowl?”³ Within that thought lies a whole host of other musings about the trajectory of pop music itself: whether current artists can create a discography so widely legible it is consumed by millions of people, whether they can sustain sufficient popularity to single-handedly attract an audience in the first place, and whether the modern-day pop star even wants to in the first place.

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Nothing, and Everything at the same time

 

A peculiar thing about all music is that, realistically, it has no economic value.4 

 

There are 2 main reasons for this. The first is that there is a near infinite supply of music available nowadays (Spotify itself has over 100 million songs, which would take you 500+ years to listen to).5 This means that the marginal value of the average song would be near 0, due to this excessive surplus of supply. Secondly, music is a non-rival good, meaning that one person can consume it without affecting the utility of another consumer. Me listening to my favourite song does not worsen the experience for anyone else listening to the same one. This thus means that it is difficult to price music, as an unlimited number of people can enjoy music without incurring any additional costs.

 

If that is the case, how are so many musicians that rich? It is certainly not from streaming — Spotify pays almost nothing (between $.003 - $.005 per stream).6  Instead, most artists make the majority of their income through touring, merchandise, and maybe even by starting a beauty brand (we’re still waiting for that album, Rihanna). As Scott Welch—Alanis Morissette’s manager—said, “The top 10% of artists make money selling records, the rest go on tour”.7 

 

This feels intuitive, doesn’t it? We all know how much the Eras Tour raked in ($1.04 billion, in case you need a reminder), but it’s worth asking: how do pop stars like Taylor Swift manage to charge such high prices for concert tickets? After all, isn’t music supposed to have no inherent economic value?

 

Here is where the paradox comes in. Even though the music that an artist produces might be worth virtually nothing, the artist herself is priceless (as many fans know to be true). The artist is a pure monopoly — there is only one of them. As a result, the very forces that make music ostensibly worthless (because of non-rivalrousness and non-excludability) make products such as concerts and merchandise so valuable. As stated in the American Institute for Economic Research:

 

“A Taylor concert has economic value because her physical being is the ultimate rivalrous good: Since there’s only one of her, she’s the perfect monopoly. And her time is scarce: She is here right now, and the concert I might be consuming is a non-durable service that I can only have right now. Nobody else but the 72,000 other spectators, all paying handsomely for the privilege, can have this one.” 8

 

It might seem that only concerts render the connection between artists and fans explicit, where a demand for an artist’s output derives from a demand for the artist herself. But it applies to everything else too. We buy those rare colour variants of vinyls because it signals our dedication and proximity to the artist. Or those Lana Del Rey coke necklaces. Or even Yeezys, once upon a time. The value of these products can stem from multiple places: cultural capital, a symbol of one’s appreciation and resonance, or it might just be a good product, period. But at least some portion of this value is tied up to the demand for the artist themselves.

 

Which leads me to TikTok.

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For you, and only you

 

Imagine the glorious 2010s. It is a sunny afternoon and your parents are driving you back from the after-school activity you have on. The radio is playing gently in the background. They have their week-end charts, compiling the hottest songs of the day. They are now at number 1. The radio host puts on a performed eager voice. Will it be Adele? Rihanna? Or will it be Maroon 5 yet again?

 

This was a time, where most entertainment was centralised. Everyone watched the same TV channels, listened to the same radio stations. This is monoculture: everyone consumed media through the same platforms, thus establishing globally recognisable, hegemonic pieces of entertainment. Think Adele’s 21. Or Despacito. Or Avenger’s Endgame. 

 

However, when TikTok started becoming popular during the pandemic, it ushered in the fragmentation of this monoculture. This mostly has to do with how the app works. In the article, Intimate Snapshots: TikTok, Algorithm and the Recreation of Identity, Rodgers & Lloyd-Evans point out how browsing TikTok “uncover[ed] the traces of our own identity, traces which are detected by the algorithm and repurposed into a new iteration of identity in the forms of videos generated”.9 This differed from entertainment formats of the past, where media was consumed one-way and thus there did not exist an opportunity for personalised feedback. The dynamic with TikTok feels like a two-way relationship, where the platform extracts users’ data and supplies captivating content tailored to one’s tastes and preferences, while users continuously provide this data and consume the media.

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Path to Stardom

 

The result of these fundamental differences in the 2 media formats is this: while artists of the past often tailored their media to be as palatable as possible for broad audiences, the format to success now seemingly relies on the hyper-specificity of one’s content to reach the right demographic niche. The platform might be global (TikTok has over 1 billion users),10 but the content itself is wholly tailored to the individual, entirely unique. On an artistic level, this could be something worthy of celebration. Pop stars can now lean into their idiosyncrasies and craft music that is genuinely intimate and unique, rather than having to compromise their vision with commercial interests.

 

Think about all the recent artists that have come to prominence over the past couple of years. Sabrina Carpenter, Chappell Roan, but maybe even Doja Cat or Olivia Rodrigo. For the average person (of the non-TikTok user kind), it would feel as if they mysteriously burst into fame with these massive hit songs materialising everywhere. However, the truly chronically-online will know that there was a clear charted path to their stardom, beginning with a single video or dance that went viral before exponentially snowballing into a proliferation of other songs and videos, until they eventually crash head-first into the mainstream.

 

All the modern pop stars are highly successful at capitalising on this “snowball effect” of the algorithm. They deliberately create content deeply personalised and alterable to their demographic, forming a connection that is rewarded by further interaction, perhaps even roping fans into creating more of this content. Once again, those TikTok dances. Or those different “Nonsense” outros Sabrina Carpenter did in every city. Or the different album aesthetics people dressed up as to attend the Eras Tour. Think about how all of them embody a distinctive style that fans could easily emulate and model themselves after, ensuring this unique engagement and association with them.

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Fans over streams?

 

In this new era of media, will future pop stars still be big enough to play in the SuperBowl? The answer is — probably not, at least in the foreseeable future. But that is because the fundamental nature of pop stardom seems to have altered, and the former channels by which artists became famous have given way to a more democratised route, courtesy of TikTok. While artists of a previous age had to sand off the idiosyncrasies of their music to reach the widest possible audiences, the personalised nature of modern entertainment seems to reward music that speaks as personally to us as possible. The For You Pages have become these detailed reflections of our unique identities, and the artists we engage with on these platforms feel as intimate as video calling a close friend, relaying their own thoughts and struggles from behind the screen.

 

Returning to the reason behind what drives artists’ revenue in the first place, we can see how having a small but committed fanbase might be preferable to being a globally recognisable star without that core group of fans. After all, as I have highlighted, creating a viral billion-stream smash hit is not likely to generate as much money as you might imagine. Think about all the one-hit wonders whose careers have fizzled out, compared to your local indie artists who have managed to carve out longevity and a career from less than a million listeners. 

In the end, it is that loyal core of fans that provide a steady and substantial portion of an artist’s income — by going for concerts, buying merchandise, and forming a committed relationship to their artistry and persona. In Charli XCX’s case, it was these fans who supported her through a phase of experimentation as a “cult artist”, until her viral moment came and burst her onto the mainstream — with all the strength and impact of Billie Eillish smashing through a house with a tractor.11

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References

¹ Charli XCX | Biography, Music & News | Billboard

² Charli XCX | Biography, Music & News | Billboard

³ Popcast (Deluxe): Will There Ever Be Another Global Pop Icon? - The New York Times (nytimes.com)

4,5,8 Music Has No Economic Value | AIER

6 How Much Spotify Pays Per Stream and How to Earn More (businessinsider.com)

7 Rockonomics: The Economics of Popular Music | NBER

9 (PDF) Intimate Snapshots: TikTok, Algorithm, and the Recreation of Identity (researchgate.net)

10 TikTok Statistics You Need to Know in 2024 (backlinko.com)

11Charli xcx - Guess featuring Billie Eilish (official video) (youtube.com)