Recommendations of the Editorial team
First of all: Everyone should be treated to earning as much money as they can with their skills. As we know, this does not always depend on talent and ability. This applies to work in hairdressers as well as in the executive department at Apple.
In the arts, however, things are somewhat different. It has just been announced that Beyoncé has also joined the illustrious club of musicians who have more than a billion in their account. Also in this league: Beyoncé’s husband Jay-Z, Taylor Swift, Rihanna and Bruce Springsteen.
All of the artists mentioned earn their money. They deserve it because they have been successful for years, because they function as a brand, because they sell albums and go on XXL tours (Beyoncé’s “Renaissance” tour alone brought in $600 million in sales, and the much shorter “Cowboy Carter” concert tour also grossed $400 million). They also make cash with products that can advertise with their good name and have their own companies.
When only success counts
But if you look closely, you’ll see that the gap between successful and very successful musicians is growing exponentially from year to year. Newcomers already found it difficult to pay for their own lunch. That hasn’t changed. But many people today don’t have much left, even after initial success. One gets the impression that art itself is no longer the deciding factor. Reports about sales and records for Taylor Swift have long been a journalistic genre of their own. It turns out that the most successful in their profession have long since become entrepreneurs.
Historically, if you want to have something to say artistically, this often arises from lack, risk and friction. Even the freelance musician with a big inheritance in his bank account has to prove himself first. In fact, failure wouldn’t matter to billionaire musicians, but economic success tends to become their only currency.
Entrepreneurship aims at repeatability and risk minimization. Art wants to be unpredictable and unique. Failure is even part of the program here. Musicians who become billionaires objectively have no reason to fail and therefore less reason to really dare to do anything.
This means that for economic reasons, music, no matter how good it may be, is no longer primarily an individual expression, but rather a form of product maintenance with target group loyalty. When people talk and write about Swift, Beyoncé and wealthy rappers, their intelligent, self-reflective work is often just a side issue. At the center of the discourse is a perfectly optimized artistic ecosystem. Taylor, the best friend. Beyoncé, the black feminist. Jay-Z, the entertainer and hip hop mogul.
It’s about the work and not about the products
When Beyoncé sings about empowerment but at the same time invests in tax havens or ignores workers in supply chains, an aesthetic short circuit is created that begins to bite into the magical narratives of pop culture. It is still the case that artists should be in a tension with society. This is the only way her work gains value, because it questions certainties, opens up unknown alliances, disturbs, describes beauty, and shows the intimate.
Bruce Springsteen may have long since become a national treasure as an icon of artistic resistance with his songs about (broken) workers and the under-noticed losers of American society, but for him too the question arises as to whether what he sings about isn’t more of a reenactment of emotions and conditions than an experience that he can draw from his own life.
Certainly, this has its own value that cannot be disputed. And you don’t have to immediately calculate that the boss was more artistically relevant when he didn’t yet have a billion together. But if we are serious about the terms aura and authenticity, then we should at least ask ourselves whether we want to live in a world in which musicians (have to) brood less and less about things and (should) become more performance activists who sell their ideas like highly emotional products.