From 'sold out' to outsold
When fans are corporate cheerleaders.
When Fall Out Boy received a Grammy nomination for Best New Artist in 2005, the fandom was up in arms. The lack of fourth wall was part of what had sustained the fandom, fuelled by bassist and frontman Pete Wentz’ Livejournal, his “secret” blogs, interactions with fan club members, and his irreverent, yet occasionally sincere answering of fan questions on the band’s official site. (And later, his launch of the emo MySpace, FriendsOrEnemies.)
Suddenly, this accessibility was a liability, and fans made their displeasure known. Since Wentz cut his teeth in the Chicago hardcore scene, it made sense that he would feel the pressure to address the fans.
On the band’s official site, Wentz wrote,
i have been scared of being in a big band for a long time. i dont want to alienate our old fans. i dont want our old fans to hate our new ones. i want us to all come together and escape a world outside full of craziness. just for like an hour- just to get us through until the next time. thats what these shows always were for me. i looked up to guys like billy joe and tim armstrong. i dont think there is anything wrong with getting some level of success or attention if you use it to uplift people. to let them know its okay to feel okay in their skin.
— Pete Wentz on FallOutBoyRock, Dec 8th 2005, 4:30AM
There were defenders, of course, the below post taken from the FallOutBoyLove Livejournal community, one of the non-official hubs for fans to gather and discuss the band, is an example. This isn’t the overly defensive stan approach of today, but it is a measured response to the natural progression of a band’s growth.
Later in the day, Wentz also wrote on his “secret” blog about the negative response the nomination garnered, about hearing people saying the band didn’t deserve it, and tried to remind the faceless readers that the band’s music was still for them, the meaning was in what they got out of it, not in what other people were saying.
It was a nice sentiment, though I’m not sure how deeply it penetrated.
Tim McIlrath, a former bandmate of Wentz’ from his hardcore days, found himself getting ahead of fan backlash when his band Rise Against signed with a major in 2004.
He is quoted in
’s excellent book SELLOUT on why he addressed the fans directly, “I don’t think there’s ever been a time in history when a fan was excited when their favourite band signed to a major label. ‘Good for them, they have families’—no one’s ever said that.”Twenty years ago, his statement was certainly true, but today? I’m not so sure. We have stans talking about how their fave is richer, has more social media engagement, how their tour revenues broke records, how they outsold.
There has been a seismic shift in culture in those twenty years.
did an excellent dive into the disintegration of the concept of “selling out,” absolutely worth a read, but I’m looking at the fandom reaction that spurred on Wentz and McIlrath to speak up.Fall Out Boy didn’t win their Grammy,1 and perhaps that was for the best. When The Black Keys guested on Joe Rogan’s podcast in 2019, Patrick Carney discussed the band’s 2013 Grammy nominations and said that not winning Record of the Year was ultimately a positive, because of the industry dominoes that would’ve been set in motion if they had,
“If we won record of the year for Lonely Boy, Warner Bros. was going to service that song to Top 40. It would've probably never been a hit, but if we would've won that Grammy, it could've fucked our whole band up. I've seen it with lots of bands, you become playschool level. [You really think that you guys would change?] No dude, it’s not— You start accessing, you start acquiring a fan base that's more fickle, and maybe more annoying.”
The annoying fan base in question is the outsold quotient. Those that are drawn to the popularity of the thing, who more easily discard it when the hype cycle moves on.
For professional musicians on major labels, with managers, agents, and publicists, I imagine the pressure to deliver numbers is immense. To receive that same pressure from the fan base that is supposed to connect with the music must be bizarre, and no doubt has ruined many a band.
There will always be fans who are possessive of their favourites, but these days there is a proliferation of what can only be termed corporate cheerleaders who wear their faves’ sales figures like a badge of honour, using the data to batter the perceived opposition. Fandom spaces are littered with their declarations, and it’s particularly notable on the corners of Twitter known as “stan Twitter.”
If this is foreign to you, you can look at the replies to any Pop Crave or Chart Data tweet. Or simply search for “Justin outsold” or “Ariana outsold” or “Rihanna outsold” or whoever else you can think of, and you’ll be presented with thousands of tweets arguing about sales figures, as if they mean something to the fans, as if these are particularly vocal shareholders bragging about future returns.
Doing historical research on Twitter is difficult considering the turnover of accounts and frequent deletion of tweets, but what I found when digging this week is that prior to 2010, most tweets that contained the word “outsold” were talking about tech, cars and gaming consoles.
There were the occasional tweets about Rihanna, Chris Brown, Lady Gaga, but the real shift seemed to come with the 2009 edition of American Idol.
It’s difficult to put the blame entirely on the fans and anti-fans for taking to Twitter to brag and attack when these artists entered the public consciousness on a competition show, but that doesn’t mean it was a positive for culture.
I don’t see much difference between the fans that spend their time arguing about winning and music critic Gina Arnold’s declaration in 1991 that “we won” because Nirvana’s Nevermind topped the charts. I’ve no doubt it felt good to see your scene, your taste represented at the top of the charts, but was it really a win? And if it was, was it really for the underground that ultimately ended up assimilated, supplanted and sold back to a lukewarm audience?
In June 1994, the zine Maximum RocknRoll published an edition waving warning flags about the major label machinery that was infiltrating the scene, covertly, in many cases. I highly recommend giving it a read, because despite being 30 years old, it’s the kind of background information that is good to know for contemporary music fans. It may even be a wake-up call to see the contributors talking about “the big six” considering we are now down to “the big three.” Things haven’t improved, and now even fans demand numbers worthy of bragging about, lest they abandon ship.
I wonder if a lot of this outsold-phenomenon is rooted in a general pessimism about our own prospects. Industries are collapsing around us, AI is coming for our jobs, but we can still pick the winning team, argue over single sales versus album sales, streaming numbers versus touring revenues.
This year, there was a fan battle between Billie Eilish and Taylor Swift fans due to the proximity of their album releases. Yet, they are both under Universal Music Group.
They are far from the only acts who are positioned against one another whose revenue line the same pockets. If we stick with UMG: Katy Perry, Rihanna, Ariana Grande, Olivia Rodrigo, Nicki Minaj, Justin Bieber, Sabrina Carpenter, Lana Del Rey, Eminem, Drake, The Weeknd, Camila Cabello…
These are all artists who have been pit against each other at some point, whether by press or fans. And while the fans duke it out, trying to out-purchase one another for the glory of it all, Sir Lucian Grainge ultimately reaps the profits of the fan wars. This exercise can be done with all three major labels with similar results because there are only three, after all.
Is this really what fandom has been reduced to? Corporate cheerleading? Campaigning for business interest?
I can hear the counter-arguments now: if all these artists share a label, then it’s all the more important for fans to support their fave so that they can be prioritized? In which case, let me remind you that fans have much less power than we’ve been sold.
I keep thinking of this Christian Lorentzen quote, which is about literature, but certainly applies here as well: “To reduce aesthetics to the results of sales strategy is to equate the pleasure we take in reading to being duped by a marketing campaign.”
And so much of the numbers that are reported on are a result of strategy. That’s why there’s so much disagreement, and why there are so many different metrics being brought up with regularity.
Surely, artists would rather their creative output be appreciated rather than parrot the same talking points as their de-facto handlers?
I’ve been concerned for some time now that the worst traits and habits of sports fans have been absorbed by music fans, and this is a perfect example of that, and doesn’t bode well for my more pessimistic predictions. Fandom is supposed to be about shared appreciation and enjoyment of a piece of culture. Leave the number fudging to the professionals.2 Leave the whitewashing to the publicists.
In 2019 they received their second Grammy nomination, this time for Best Rock Album for the album Mania. This album is generally regarded as one of their worst. It also landed at number 1 on the Billboard charts, something that the far superior following album didn’t do. This is only relevant due to the topic of this post, wherein sales metrics are treated as holy scripture.
Once you know the extent to which numbers can be and are massaged, they lose their shine.
It does stand out to me that the list of artists whose rabid fanbases cheer for UMG are all solo artists, not bands. I guess I've heard people describe solo artists as "selling out" before, but the demise of "selling out" as a concept seems tied to the demise of rock music as a relevant force in popular culture.
"Or simply search for “Justin outsold” or “Ariana outsold” or “Rihanna outsold” or whoever else you can think of, and you’ll be presented with thousands of tweets arguing about sales figures, as if they mean something to the fans, as if these are particularly vocal shareholders bragging about future returns."
This is something I noticed in gaming discourse as well before retreating from those kinds of spaces, the shareholder comparison is something I also arrived at. We are gamers, not shareholders, why do you care how much this game sold. I don't care about the Wii U's sales numbers, it was a great console with unique features and games that I greatly enjoyed, that's what matters to me.
Pokémon fans in particular have become such corporate cheerleaders that I think paid shills would be less extreme. Cheering for the games that represent new lows in series quality selling well and for a patent trolling lawsuit against an indie game. There's starting to be a pattern of them creating and spreading misinformation to protect their beloved brand, always easily broken by looking at what the developers themselves actually said or did.