When A Pop Star's Biggest Fans Become A Big Headache

Maybe you noticed it when Doja Cat lashed out at her fanbase this summer. Maybe you noticed it when Charli XCX called one of her fans a c*nt last year on Twitter. Or maybe you noticed it when a campaign asking Taylor Swift to break up with Matty Healy started to make the rounds online this spring. When did having superfans become such a headache? Sometimes literally so — just ask Bebe Rexha, who got hit in the face with a flung phone at her own concert. This year, in fandom, the call was coming from inside the house.

Fan armies and die-hard stans have been helping propel their favorite artists to the top of the charts and defending their reputations for years — if you criticize Nicki Minaj in public, even witness protection probably couldn’t save you from her Barbz at this point. But what those fans expect in return is coming into sharper focus as they wield more and more influence, getting artists to do everything from delete embarrassing lyrics to release alternate versions of songs or music videos. When even Beyoncé makes addressing fan complaints part of her tour, you know things have gotten annoying.

Let’s start with Doja Cat: In July, the “Paint the Town Red” rapper disowned the “Kittenz” moniker many of her fans had organized under in a since-deleted Thread: “My fans don’t name themselves sh*t. If you call yourself a ‘kitten’ or f*cking ‘kittenz,’ that means you need to get off your phone and get a job and help your parents with the house.” When a fan pointed out that Doja herself had selected “kittenz” as a fan name years ago, the singer replied drolly, “when I was an alcoholic teen.”

“The ‘I want to speak to your manager,’ kind of a ‘Karen’ archetype — that’s working its way into pop music a lot.”

Doja’s blowup might have been born of legitimate frustration — her new music openly wrestles with the pressures of superstardom and ditches the glossy pop of 2021’s Planet Her. (She has also gleefully embraced being a troll in the past and at times gone out of her way to ruffle feathers.) But to her fans, who cheered her on her path from Internet novelty act to legitimate hitmaker, it must have felt like a slap in the face. According to figures that Instagram provided Billboard, the kerfuffle cost Doja close to a quarter million followers over one weekend. One of her Instagram fan accounts, Doja Cat Brazil, almost walked away from covering her. And while none of that has derailed her career by any means — she still has some 24 million other followers, and “Paint the Town Red” still hit No. 1 — the transgression highlighted the artist-fan dynamic that’s become the norm: Fans put in free labor to boost their favorite artists’ careers, and in return, they expect to be rewarded with, at the very least, acknowledgment and appreciation.

Stans today are “treating themselves as employees” of their favorite artist, says songwriter AJ Marks, who moderates the Popheads subreddit and hosts the Main Pod Girl podcast. Now consider that stans are getting “younger and younger,” Marks adds, on top of the way pandemic isolation distorted our online relationships, and you’re starting to see new levels of fan entitlement. “The ‘I want to speak to your manager,’ kind of a ‘Karen’ archetype — that’s working its way into pop music a lot,” Marks says.

“There is an entitlement in fan culture, but the most savvy and successful artists know that and step up — just look at Taylor Swift.”

Electro-pop auteur Charli XCX has assembled one of pop’s most tight-knit fan communities, which has elevated her from cult favorite to actual commercial force over the past decade. But in recent years, she’s reckoned with the ways an open dialogue with fans can take its toll.

When Charli kicked off her 2019 tour, “a wave of negative tweets flooded my notifications after I posted the set list,” the anonymous creator of @FckyeahCharli, a Charli XCX fan account, tells Bustle. According to them, “this barrage of hurtful comments reached Charli.” Last year, as the singer was rolling out her album Crash, she publicly struggled with the way fans picked apart her creative choices. “I have been feeling like I can’t do anything right,” she wrote on X, the site formerly known as Twitter. “I’m really out here trying my best and working my *ss off.” A few days later, when a fan called her “mother” in a tweet — actually a term of endearment! — she went on the defense: “if u wanna throw around midlife crisis f*cking throw it at me.” The real twist: Crash ended up being her most commercially successful album and is widely beloved among the fandom.

“What makes a stan a stan is the fact that they are loud and opinionated and hyper aware and super concerned about the artist,” says one industry executive with experience in publicity, digital marketing, and management, who notes that superfans are often “the first people that I look to” for reactions to an artist’s output. “But at the time, they are not behind the scenes. They don’t see the nitty-gritty. They just don’t always have the full picture, so you have to take what they say with a grain of salt sometimes.”

“There’s an entire general public out there that doesn’t even f*cking know about whatever might be happening. They’re listening to the music.”

With all the drama unfolding online, it’s perhaps not surprising that things bubble over when fans get in the room with their faves. Bebe Rexha’s assailant thought it would be “funny” to throw a phone at her; Kelsea Ballerini was hit in the head by what appeared to be a gift a fan tossed on stage; and while she wasn’t physically harmed, Pink seemed plenty disturbed by the fan who threw a family member’s ashes onstage.

“I wonder how much this behavior comes from fans feeling a lack of respect for or resentment towards an artist, either because they don’t think their shows are trying hard enough or the artist doesn’t give enough back to their fans,” asks Telegraph music editor Eleanor Halls, who also writes pop culture newsletter Pass the Aux and co-hosts the Straight Up podcast. “There is an entitlement in fan culture, but the most savvy and successful artists know that and step up — just look at Taylor Swift, who puts an exhausting amount of effort into pleasing her fans, from Easter egg hunts and dazzling shows to constant re-releases and bonus tracks. I can’t imagine anyone chucking anything at her during one of her shows.”

But even in Swift’s world, no good deed goes unpunished: To some fans, those endless merch and vinyl offerings are just a “shameless cash grab.” And then there’s all the feedback about her personal life. Swift’s brief, alleged relationship with Matty Healy of The 1975 earlier this year prompted plenty of handwringing from Swifties over the ways his recent interview comments seemed out of step with her — and their — values. (He’s since apologized.) For an artist who’s made a career spinning her romantic life into songwriting gold, exerting pressure about who she should and shouldn’t date impedes on the very thing that makes someone a fan in the first place: art made from lived experiences, good and bad. It was reported that Swift and Healy broke up after a few weeks of dating, and many outlets suspected Healy’s controversies played a role in the split.

“It’s this weird in-between,” Marks said of artists in fandoms in general. “People want to believe [artists] are going out of their way to do things for them, but they need to know that artists are doing it for themselves.”

So what’s a superstar to do when fans are nitpicking? Not much other than soldier on. “You don't need to respond to everything,” says the industry insider, partly because stans don’t represent the artist’s entire listening base anyway. “It might feel like [they do] because they’re the first responders to tweets or Instagram posts. They’re the ones who are in an artist’s DMs, so they’re incredible visible.” But those superfans might only be a fraction of the millions of monthly listeners they have on Spotify. “You can’t forget that there’s an entire general public out there that doesn’t even f*cking know about whatever might be happening. They’re listening to the music.”

“I think that there are a lot of people who expect fame to be synonymous with wealth, and it often isn’t. You’re just famous without actually being rich.”

And if they do want to say something, owning their decision unapologetically has its own power. In a Notes app post from earlier this year, Miley Cyrus defended her decision to not tour behind her highly successful Endless Summer Vacation album. “Even if I don’t see them face to face every night at a concert, my fans are felt deeply in my heart,” she wrote. “ I just don’t want to sleep on a moving bus. It isn’t what’s best for me right NOW.”

With pop fame of this magnitude, Marks says, winning fans’ approval every time is simply impossible — and artists shouldn’t try to: “You’re not going to win everyone over. So you’ve just gotta make career decisions for yourself.” Surely all the money makes it easier to withstand the blowback? Perhaps. But Marks says that, in some cases, fans overestimate the amount of power pop stars really have. In the era of streaming and social media, it’s much easier to get famous than it is to get wealthy.

“I’ve talked with way too many famous people to know that it has a lot of benefits but it has so many downsides. I think that there are a lot of people who expect fame to be synonymous with wealth, and it often isn’t. You’re just famous without actually being rich… And then you just have everyone hating on you.”