is this the end of fandominance?

artists need fans to keep them relevant, motivated and paid. sometimes artists also need fans to stay out of it

When I was 15 I went to my first ever One Direction concert. We saved up our money, travelled for hours on the ferry to the city we were seeing them in, stood outside their hotel with hundreds of other fans, watched the concert, and then on our way to catch the boat home, spotted (and followed) a gaggle of other girls through the streets until we reached the fogged glass windows of a Wellington bar where the boys were drinking. They came over, we interacted through the glass, we all laughed, and we left to catch our ferry home.

This was in 2012. With over ten years of hindsight, I can see that this was invasive and weird behaviour. Yes, we paid for the concert tickets and travel arrangements, so we were owed an experience, but the experience we were owed was what they gave us on stage - a concert, some banter, and at a stretch, the POTENTIAL that we would see them out the back of the venue, where there would be security, and where that type of interaction was expected.

The photos and videos I got from that night lived and died on my iPod Touch, so the only proof that it even happened are my memories. Memories that I look back on now and think “fuck, I would never do that these days.”

Last week Taylor Swift got swarmed outside Jack Antonoff and Margaret Qualley’s wedding. A month before that it was outside the music studio she was recording at. Fans were so outraged at her alleged relationship with Matty Healy that they wrote her an open letter begging her to break up with him. Amongst all of this, Taylor (of whom I’m an enormous fan) hasn’t said a thing.

Fandom has entered a new era where fans are discovering their power and abusing it, and unlike Taylor (who takes so much pride in her relationship with her fans that she literally invited them into her home for secret listening parties), some artists have decided that enough is enough.

Doja Cat

First, we have Doja Cat, who took perhaps the most… abrasive route, when it came to calling out her fans. Over the past month she’s lost over a million followers by infamously threadding (lol, like tweeting, or x-ing, but on threads) that she doesn’t love her fans because she “doesn’t even know y’all,” and that if they call themselves “kittens” they need to get off their phones, get jobs and help their parents “with the house.” She said that watching the mass unfollowing that ensued made her feel ‘free:’

"Seeing all these people unfollow makes me feel like I've defeated a large beast that's been holding me down for so long," she wrote. "It feels like I can reconnect with the people who really matter and love me for who i am and not for who i was."

I wasn’t surprised at this type of behaviour from Doja - over a year ago she announced that she was ‘quitting music’ after the way her fans behaved when she cancelled a show in Paraguay due to literal flooding - but I was surprised to learn that even after losing all those followers and telling her fans they’re crazy, she continued to thrive in the metric that really counts - her music. Doja just made Spotify history with her latest single “Paint The Town Red” as the first female solo artist to reach the number one spot on the top 50 US chart.

So what’s happening here? Are the online fans that much of a small (but noisy) group that their online devotion didn’t actually make a difference to her streams? Were they all still streaming her music, just in private? Was this all just really good publicity for the new single? Who’s to know. Either way, a boundary between Doja and her fans has been put in place.

Phoebe Bridgers

A story I often reference on our podcast when we talk about poor fan behaviour is from Phoebe Bridgers, and how (as she says): “there’s a higher chance that you’ll meet a fan that you hate than a fan that you love… you’re way more likely to be confronted with someone who just violated your privacy.”

The story we talk about specifically is how her ‘fans’ treated her (and her new partner Bo Burnham) in the airport on the way to her father’s wake, after she’d announced his death to the world a few days earlier. Speaking to Them, she said:

“People with my picture as their Twitter picture, who claim to like my music, fucking bullied me at the airport on the way to my father's funeral this year”

“If you're a kid and the internet somehow taught you that that's an okay thing to do, then of course I hate capitalism and everything that led you to believe that it's okay to do that,” Bridgers says. But, she continues, “I, at one of the lowest points of my life, saw people who claim to love me fucking dehumanize me and shame me and fucking bully me on the way to my dad's wake.”

“It's not like they didn't know my dad just died,” she continues. “A lot of the top comments [were] like, ‘Hey, her dad just died, what are you guys doing?’” If you harass her with her face as your profile picture, “I fucking hate you,” Phoebe says, “and I hope you grow the fuck up.”

While she says that yes - most of the people she talks to ‘light up’ her life and remind her what she loves about the job, she’s starting to set the boundary that she doesn’t “have to sit here and be fucking grateful that that happened and that that's a part of my job.”

Teaming up with her boys - Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker - has helped her come to this realisation.

“I appreciate being able to look at two other people and be like, this is dehumanizing abuse, horrible shit.”

Ethel Cain

I remember reading an article in The Guardian where Ethel Cain (Hayden Anhedönia) talked about how she yearns for a time when her fanbase was smaller, and that she has turned down the opportunity to share stages or sing on tracks with bigger artists because more eyes and ears aren’t what she wants.

“At the time of the album’s release, Anhedönia told the New York Times that she was happy to “play Miss Alt-Pop Star and … parade myself around” if it meant that she would be able to build a sustainable career. A year later, she seems less sure. Zooming from her bedroom in Pittsburgh, perched on a desk chair in a forest green hoodie, in front of a window that’s been blacked-out with a blanket, she says that she “would really love to have a much smaller fanbase, and kind of go back to where I was aiming for ahead of time” instead of the intense scrutiny – positive and negative – she faces now.”

As someone who was notably ‘good at the internet,’ Cain said she soon began to feel like she was “a dancing monkey in a circus.”

“It’s very like, ‘Oh, she’s so funny on Twitter, she’s so relatable’ and then it becomes this big weird joke cycle,” she says. Although she stresses that she loves the support and adoration of her fans, she says it can become demoralising to not have her art met on the level she’d like it to be: “Don’t get me wrong, laughter and memes and jokes are always really fun. But when you want to post something to be consumed seriously, people are still joking – and then you get like, thousands of comments that are like, ‘silly goose’. All of a sudden, you start to feel like you can’t turn off the memeable internet personality thing.”"

Which resulted in her deleting her Twitter:

“I always kind of conflated openness with honesty and I thought that if I was completely transparent and bared every aspect of my soul that people would think I was relatable and kinda cool,” she says. “Then I was like, I don’t want to know you. I don’t want to be friends with you. I don’t want to have all of my personal business and every innermost thought just out there on the internet for the world to see.”

And only recently I was scrolling Tumblr and saw that she’d doubled down on all of this, posting:

“i’ll still use this account every now and then of course, i’ll post my updates and new music and whatnot considering this is the only social media i have. i do love all of you that have been here from the get-go, from before PD, even before inbred. i’ve known a lot of you for a long time and y’all have been supporting me from the jump and i value you all very much. i’ll never delete this account so don’t worry about that. i’ve just suddenly gotten a huge influx of followers out of nowhere and the spam in my comments makes this account almost unusable. i like to engage with people creatively on here and see your thoughts and discussions, not read a slew of mother slay comments forever and ever. call me a bitch, call me annoying, call me cringe, idc it’s just not what i log onto tumblr to read. (and yes, this account is called mothercain. i named it that years ago as ethel cain started as the matriarch in a horror story. it’s not meant to be stan lingo lol.)

i love the internet! i wanna be on the internet in my own way! i garner just as much creative inspiration from tumblr and pinterest and youtube and whatnot as i do from non-internet sources. i’ll always be lurking on this website, i’m simply gonna use this account less. if you somehow find me elsewhere on this website, just don’t go sharing my new username and we can all chit chat. thanks for sticking around and listening to my music.

daughters of cain 4ever.”

This year alone there have been enough celebrities hit with things on stage to elicit BuzzFeed listicles, and I’ve seen more think pieces on concert etiquette than any normal person needs to read. This behaviour is unhinged, but of course we could try to explain it.

It could be the lack of control that fans feel in their real lives - like how the world is burning or their student loans are weighing on them (problems that they would argue the object of their affection doesn’t have to worry about) - and the little bit of control they might have is the ability to make a video of themselves throwing something at their fave go viral, or to upload a video to TikTok of them outside Taylor Swift’s studio for fifteen seconds of clout.

Maybe they’re hoping to traverse into ‘famous fan’ territory - be the next Lil Nas X who started his career as a Nicki Minaj fan, or Stalker Sarah who became ‘famous’ for taking photos with celebrities, or even an ‘Ashley Leechin’ (the Taylor Swift lookalike who just last week was spotted walking around LA with her own bodyguards, pretending to be Taylor.)

Maybe they feel like they are ‘owed’ things from their fave - as if the art their faves make isn’t enough to repay the countless hours they’ve devoted to them online (or irl.)

Or maybe they’re just young, like I was, standing outside that bar in Wellington.

Whatever the reason is, fans are behaving badly, and the pendulum needs to somehow swing back toward normacly if we want to keep having nice things. Perhaps this will happen as more artists take the Ethel or the Phoebe approach, though personally, I would still avoid taking notes from Doja.

---

If you’re interested in more of this kind of discourse, listen to our culture vulture podcast on this very subject!