What Do Celebrities Owe Their Fans?

There are times when pop star Chappell Roan wants her space. And as her fans have witnessed on her social media, she’s not shy about setting boundaries. “I don’t care that abuse and harassment is normal when it comes to people who are famous, or a little famous,” she said in a video she posted on TikTok and Instagram in August. “I don’t care that this kind of behavior comes along with the type of job or career I’ve chosen. That doesn’t make it okay, that doesn’t mean that I like it, that doesn’t mean that I want it. I don’t want what you think you’re entitled to whenever you see a celebrity.” 

After a decade in the music industry as a relatively unknown indie artist, the Midwest princess catapulted to fame following her instantly iconic set at Coachella in April 2024. This was a huge adjustment for the singer-songwriter, who had never been in the spotlight before the festival, as well as having a hit single “Good Luck, Babe!” and viral TikToks and Instagram reels of her energetic live performances. But the combination of her hit song, her festival set, and her social-media presence, Roan has solidified a massive new fanbase. 

In theory, this is the ideal for any pop singer, because having so many fans enables a pop star to leverage the profit that comes with visibility into gaining creative autonomy. But that also comes at a price, working in an industry that has a reputation for exploiting powerless artists by molding them into the most palatable and mainstream version of themselves for maximum earnings. 

Roan’s 2024 trajectory is a great case study in how celebrity functions in America, particularly because she has had to take a crash course in balancing fame with privacy and personal space. In the beginning of 2024, Roan was able to go out in public in peace. But now, she encounters fans who demand her attention, her kindness, and her gratitude. Even more bafflingly, in September, Roan was widely criticized for not endorsing Vice-President Kamala Harris as a presidential candidate, and was forced to clarify that she is critical of all people in power. When she expressed her discomfort and set boundaries around her political and social lives, she received quite a bit of backlash online from critics who felt she should be grateful for her success. 

It’s the ultimate trade-off: You’re allowed to make the art you want if you sacrifice your whole self to your audience. Back in 2016, an Amy Schumer fan who was insisting the comic take a photo with him, even as she asked him to stop, articulated this dynamic perfectly. The man told her: “No, it’s America and we paid for you.” If you’re famous, the public believes they get to do whatever they want with you, as some kind of a treat in exchange for the horrors. 

Obsessive behavior toward celebrities is nothing new. Recall John Lennon, who was assassinated outside the Dakota, his New York City apartment building, in 1980 by Mark David Chapman, a former Beatles devotee. Designer Gianni Versace was killed in 1997, by Andrew Cunanan, who later claimed the two were friends, which Versace’s family later denied. At the young age of 23 and at the height of her fame, Tejano singer Selena Quintanilla-Pérez was fatally shot in 1995 by Yolanda Saldívar, the president of her fan club. 

These extreme, horrific cases happened before fandom occupied a significant corner of the internet, where unhinged thoughts are posted publicly rather than in private letters. While these behaviors are nothing new, the internet, and especially social media, has accelerated and exacerbated a pre-existing power dynamic between idols and their devotees, according to music journalist Dr. Jenessa Williams.

“Social media and streaming has undoubtedly accelerated everything for celebrity musicians,” said Williams, whose postdoctoral research focused on #MeToo and music fandom at Stanford University. “In such a saturated marketplace, artists are encouraged to lean heavily on the support of their most committed audiences, and in doing so, really embolden their fans to understand themselves as a vital part of their success, which can lead to the forms of entitlement that become problematic when taken too far.”

The entertainment industry encourages musicians—and celebrities in general—to share their personal lives on social media, according to Williams. This sort of content wasn’t readily available to fans before the internet. “In forcing most artists to essentially become 24/7 content creators as well as musicians, the boundaries have become severely blurred, and so trickles down a belief that an artist must be ‘on’ at all times, constantly online, constantly happy to meet fans in the street, constantly willing to go the extra mile if they want to avoid being labeled as rude or ungrateful for the privileged position they find themselves within,” she said.

***

The fact is, fans are vital to a celebrity’s success. This isn’t to say that Roan—and everyone else who has ever complained about this concession—is wrong. But the entertainment economy can’t survive without attention. The relationship between fandoms and a celebrity’s success is symbiotic. Beatlemania, for example, was one of the first well-documented phenomenons in pop culture, when four unknown rock musicians from Liverpool shot to fame in a very short time. It was so intense that not only did the band stop touring, but it became the subject of psychological and sociological studies. Women who attended Beatles’ concerts would often faint from the exhilaration of being close to their idols, and while this kind of behavior was scorned initially by commentators, the Beatles went on to become not just household names, but influential, enduring artists. To this day, 82-year-old Paul McCartney is still performing and touring the world.

Today, the force of a fandom remains pivotal to an artist’s success, if not more so because of social media. The number of fans streaming an artist’s music or watching their film or TV show can make the difference between an artist like Roan getting all the resources she needs for a national tour, or winging it on a shoestring budget. Having fans that relate to your art is a good thing. The problem is that the current market encourages fans to connect deeply to our favorite artists and believe we really know them. During a loneliness epidemic, any feeling of meaningfulness can fill the void we carry—and those feelings can get amplified. 

As a queer woman, I completely understand the desire to connect with Roan because some of us may identify with or otherwise feel a powerful connection to her.  It’s not often that I see queer women on stage singing songs that resonate so deeply about women loving women, or coming out, or even evoking queer coming-of-age in general, especially with lyrics that are so similar to my own experience. Then again, Roan’s songs are personal, so many of us feel represented in ways that we haven’t before. When artists are selling us our art, they are also selling us connection to ourselves and to others—two things that queer people desperately need in a world where the way we love is marginalized, maligned and, more often than not, hidden away, even erased.  

“Most people understand that this is likely going to be a one-way thing,” explained Dr. Stephen D. Benning, a psychology professor at University of Nevada. “It’s more about a feeling of connection.”

But being an entertainer, creating art is also a job people do for money—it’s a way to survive in capitalism. There’s something that feels inescapable about the way art is mediated by fame and money, and how part of that relationship—our insight into the personal lives of celebrities, for example—can feel a bit nonconsensual. This is America, we paid for you. Roan’s objection bothers people because it gets to the heart of how we make and consume art in capitalism; our feelings are alchemized into ownership and identity. And this need to consume celebrities as if they are our personal friends is stoked by the press. 

“In the age of paparazzi mobbing, people started feeling more comfortable and more entitled to [their] physical space, feeling as if celebrities owed them these kinds of interactions,” Dr. Benning said. Recalling the attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan by John Hinckley, who’d been stalking actress Jodie Foster when she was a student at Yale, Dr. Benning speculated some fans do extreme things to better connect with their idols. 

“Hinckley thought that this is what he had to do to prove that he was worthy of Foster’s attention, to demonstrate how important she was,” Dr. Benning said. “These things have a long history of existing but the prevalence of social media allows the entitlement people might experience to have a voice.”

Fandom as an industry has been profitable since Beatlemania, from fan magazines, trading cards and other memorabilia to tabloids and the paparazzi that feed them. Consider the history that led us up to this moment: In the early 2000s, the paparazzi sold their invasive photos of celebrities caught in private moments to tabloids. Those photos typically fetched between $10,000 to $20,000. The more candid and scandalous the photos, and the bigger the celebrity, the more valuable were the photos—and the more magazines clamored for them. Of course, in order to get those shots, the photographers had to stalk and harass their subjects. Sometimes celebrities were caught during vulnerable moments in their lives, as when Britney Spears was in the grips of a mental health crisis. Her humiliating pain, cynically enough, was incredibly profitable for both the photographer and the gossip rags at the newsstands. Consider how taxing it was for the subject.

While the paparazzi are still paying the price for violating the privacy of celebrities, some stars find themselves sacrificing their privacy by exposing their candid moments on social media to maintain relevance in the entertainment market, thanks to being stuck in an art consumption cycle that encourages a superficial sense of intimacy between fans and idols. Personal identification is the easiest and quickest way to promote a TV show, but that sense of faux intimacy also can render an artist vulnerable, of course. 

And it isn’t possible to remove the personal relationships people have with art. It isn’t possible to abolish the unbearably human desire to feel seen and heard in the stories and art we consume. That’s precisely why art can be so good. Most fandom scholars I consulted for this essay were hesitant in speaking out against fandoms in general because, whether we like it or not,  this is one way communities can be built and identity can be cultivated and owned up to. The toxic people who usually make the headlines are not the norm. 

Art is supposed to be personal, but in our capitalist society, where art is made for profit, valuing personal, relatable art becomes inherently associated with ownership, with consumption. We think that spending money entitles us to that artist’s time and life. How many hugs does Chappell Roan owe me if she’s a top artist on my 2024 Spotify Wrapped? 

The answer should be zero, but for many people, it isn’t. 

***

The more I researched how consent might work (or not) in the equation of art plus fame, the more I realized that consumers—especially online—are encouraged to act unhinged because extreme emotions fuel social-media algorithms. These communities account for large parts of the internet that keep the content machine going. It’s not in the interest of any social-media platform to stop it. It’s difficult to estimate how many people engage in fandoms, but according to a recent study, 70 percent of fans say their fandom and its community are part of their everyday life, with nearly 4 out of 5 fans surveyed saying they discovered their passion through others like family or friends. Talking publicly about celebrities—or going to see them live, or going to their movies because we like them—is a way to meet at the proverbial public square for many people, and it has become a cycle we largely don’t question because of our sense of belonging. 

“I do believe any sense of fannish entitlement does stem from a place of a love, and a wider desire to be seen in the world; to feel like people see your taste level and the way it informs your identity, to feel part of the online zeitgeist or the in-jokes, and to feel like you have some kind of reliable force in your life that you can believe in and which will not let you down,” Dr. Williams said. But fans, she said, have a personal responsibility to act appropriately toward their idols.

The ability to create art should be given to anybody who wants to do it. In this way, popularity and art wouldn’t be tied to each other and there wouldn’t be pressure for artists to share their personal life for money, attention, or validation. We need to build communities that are not centered around specific people or pieces of art, but around our own needs to be around people and developing our collective and individual identities. This would also, essentially, abolish the celebrity class and do away with the idea that art-making is only for the rich and famous who are often framed as uniquely talented, and therefore, dehumanized as objects of desire or projection for our deepest feelings. Creepy behavior by some fans towards their idols are symptoms of a deeply unequal and declining society—a society that needs to change—and that’s, ultimately, what makes people feel so uncomfortable when Roan speaks out about it.