Plants here, plants there, plants everywhere

Industry plant: an imprecise term for a diffuse phenomenon.

The concept of industry plants has been on my mind for quite some time, partly because my own definition differs from the apparent common usage, and because I often find the accusations lobbed somewhat strange. But the sheer prevalence of this insult, especially in standom, is a response to something, and that is of interest to me.

A few things have come to my attention recently that seem to coalesce into why this term has become so commonplace, aside from the context collapse of online vernacular.

Kate Lindsay

said in her

Embedded

newsletter, “When we accuse someone of being an ‘industry plant,’ we’re actually—correctly—identifying them as chosen by the algorithm.”

This is indicative of something— we are responding to being bombarded by the same thing, over and over, perpetual hype that can't possibly be fulfilled. Even Substack is guilty of this, as there are quite a few media properties and pop brands have been oversaturated to the degree that any interest I might have had has been beaten into a pulp. It delivers a Twitter’s Character of the Day-vibe rather than Art I Want to Engage With-vibe.

Jonathan Gray refers to this spillover of text around the text as paratextuality, and I think we are experiencing a type of overflow that is so persistent it feels fabricated. Not only that, but there is too much content for us to directly engage with, so the paratexts act as a shortcut, as Gray puts it, “by force of necessity, we all regularly allow paratexts to stand in for texts.”

Paratexts have even become texts themselves, in some cases inspiring paratexts of their own, and the industry behind the original text is no longer the only producer or profiteer of auxiliary content, in whichever format it might come.

“Paratexts often construct some of the wider audience’s scant encounters with the text, and thus while the show might be a niche or fan property, many of its paratexts (such as trailers, movie posters, hype, reviews, and audience commentary) are not only quintessentially mainstream, but also the mediators of niche and fan entities to both fans and the wider audience.”

—Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers and Other Paratexts, 2010

Part of this paratextual overflow is the attention chasing inherent to today’s cultural climate. A recent Verge piece on how Game of Thrones fandom infected journalism particularly highlights this, saying that, “nearly every major media company sold out the things that differentiated its publications in order to take a sip.”

This approach was described as resulting in “homogenizing media” and it does feel like that is what has happened. Most people haven’t necessarily engaged with the music, film or show that is sweeping cultural discussion on any given day, but they have interacted with paratexts about them. We might not know the song, but we know all about the person singing it, who it’s supposedly about, what their clique says about it. This information is no longer an extra for those who care to find out; it’s being served up as the main course.

While the Verge piece reiterates that the GoT phenomenon “will never happen again” it feels like it’s happening all the time. Perhaps it's true on the business end; no individual company will be able to benefit, despite increasing demand, because they are all just content producers like the rest of us.

Flat culture has come for us all, obscuring the hills and valleys of the past. The chase for eyeballs entails advanced and intense coattail riding on all fronts. From the pet Instagram accounts jumping on all the Tortured Poets Department's memes to surf onto more people's feeds, to political podcasts including segments on the media du jour so they can hashtag their way onto suggested feeds. This is your gateway to discoverability.

Even Tumblr, which is notorious for being the one social media where a high follower count can’t be monetized, has people trying to squeeze some attention and finagle themselves onto more dashboards. Tracked tags and search are gamed with popular tags, clogging up those topics and increasing their sitewide rankings, which then are used to determine which tags to use to boost your content— completing the ouroboros of content.

The only two tags that belong on this post are Natalie Portman and Christian Bale.

Viktoriia Vasileva

wrote an excellent piece on this new flat culture and the parallel culture that still exists, which helped me understand my own view of so-called plants.

“[I]t feels like a large subset of the popular culture doesn’t have fringe roots. It starts with the normies and brands who have no idea what’s going on at the edges of youth culture because they can harvest money and attention without it. You can spin up makeup and fashion trends out of thin air and get clicks on it.”

This direct to mainstream push is the closest to what I consider a plant, going from broad appeal and aiming for market penetration, rather than plucked from the niches. The thing is, they don’t always succeed. In the history of mainstream, it seems pretty common that major labels would pick two or more potential stars and see which one panned out, this was the case with Rihanna vs Teairra Mari, Nick Carter vs Justin Timberlake, and many others.¹

John Seabrook’s The Song Machine does a fantastic job of looking at the mechanics behind the brands. One standout example is the case of Robyn and Britney Spears, wherein Spears was moulded after Robyn.² Max Martin (who I have written about before) was working with Robyn in the 90s, and allegedly, “Robyn was a forceful artist, and Max couldn’t always get her to do it his way.” Spears was different: she would follow instructions and allowed him to produce exactly what he wanted.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 7x01 “Lessons”

The money behind establishing a brand rather than skating on trends is substantial, beyond exorbitant advances that need to be recouped. NPR did a piece on how much it cost to “make” a hit using the Rihanna song “Man Down” as a frame, and estimated the total was over a million. For one song. And this was over a decade ago, so I suspect the cost has only gone up.

There are only so many songs, so many acts that can receive that kind of gas. A lot of people say this is just business, not plants, which I am inclined to agree with.³ When things don’t go as well as expected, efforts are usually reduced, if not outright abandoned.

Robyn is a rare exception who was discarded but persevered under her own terms and has carved out quite a niche for herself, remaining in control and receiving acclaim. Nonetheless, she started out on the factory line to direct mainstream.

Robyn, 2011 SVT Documentary

In my definition, an actual industry plant is essentially not permitted to fail. If something doesn't hit, you massage the narrative and pivot without a second thought. This is a rare thing to witness. I only know of one pop brand that I followed closely enough to make that claim about, and that's the crux as well: you need to be paying an inordinate amount of attention to tell the difference, because the glut of paratexts are misleading by default.

I think the accusations of industry plants are also a response to knowledge on how the industry works. The stan engine made up of participants in the hunger games of pop culture know that Rolling Stone and TRL and late night shows are being courted behind the scenes, that there are politics involved in bookings, they know about the months long Grammy campaigns, about playlist and radio pluggers. They know publicists are tasked with getting stories edited in favour of their clients, and that some are BFFs with the very worst tabloid reporters.

It’s hard to know what is “deserved” in those situations, especially since plenty of brands subsist on fan fumes trying to make up for the lack of official support, and when they see the juice going elsewhere, their efforts not the stop-gap they intended, but the entirety of the support, the animosity towards those who appear undeserving increases. There is usually a lot of work behind establishing a particular text or human brand, but it isn’t necessarily their work or reflective of the quality of the text itself.

I suspect this increased knowledge of the industry is behind the proliferation of secret relationship conspiracies as well. (But that’s a topic for another time, that I’ve briefly touched on before.)

When the tinhats are right

The myth of fan power

Is the concert industry doing okay?

More than anything, the cries of industry plants are a result of frustration. All the factors outlined above coalesce into a shallow, frictionless cultural landscape, noticeable in the apparent decline of the concert industry. Streams and headlines and viral moments are obnoxious and take up space, but don’t necessarily translate into an invested audience.

There exists an underground if you go looking, shovelling through the arid soil, and gems that hit personal spots are just waiting to be discovered. Learning to tolerate the glut of the paratexts is another problem entirely, but having language for the modern experience of mediated cultural interaction is a helpful start for me.

1. Note, this isn’t strictly a case of competing acts, but rather a single entity, in these cases, a label, proffering two alternatives and seeing which one sticks.

2. Fun fact, Robyn was offered “...Baby One More Time,” before it went to Spears. It was also offered to TLC and Backstreet Boys.

3. I still wish there were more recognition of the cogs behind the music and media brands we are being served and told are simply the best. The meritocracy myth in the arts doesn’t benefit anyone except those who are already on top. Publicity and brand messaging has been outsourced to willing participants and true believers.