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The realities of being a pop star

itscharlibb.substack.com

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Re: The realities of being a pop star

#61

Post by pinkmuffinere »

specialist wrote: post #58
pinkmuffinere wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Your average NBA, NFL, MLB, NHL athletes are broke 5 years after they are out of the league. Fame, is mostly a curse. I'm not familiar with the financials of music / media production (I didn't read the linked article yet, sorry). But I feel this over-pitying attitude towards professional sports players is misplaced. They do often go broke after their career. That is sad. It is also completely avoidable with _very_…

Your ideas are intriguing and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

Do you really? I keep a blog here[1], but it’s very sporadic and not very focused — i mostly write to satisfy myself

[1] https://bagelpour.wordpress.com

Re: The realities of being a pop star

#62

Post by globalnode »

saghm wrote: post #49
jppope wrote: post #18

Courtney Love wrote a fabulous article explaining the realities of a million-dollar album (2000 - https://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/ ) and it explains so much of whats actually going on that the public doesn't fully comprehend. Its a great read if you've never read it. The realities are similar to what we are reading in this article. Most of what gets talked about is gross numbers not net. Most of the benefits…

The "average" player in one of those sports leagues isn't really a celebrity at the level the article is talking about. Charli XCX's last album was nominated for 11 Grammies and won six of them, and it has the 15th highest aggregate rating from Metacritic of all time. If you're comparing to athletes, this is All-Star roster, potential MVP winning-level performance for at least that season. By no means it's every play…

never heard of them before this HN article lol. the only thing that struck me was no paragraphs in the article, just one giant wall of text. and also how bored id be living that lifestyle (personally)

Re: The realities of being a pop star

#63

Post by dsr_ »

WalterBright wrote: post #51
TechnicolorByte wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How’s that 2016 promise of LA to NYC autonomous driving goal going for Musk? Or his Cybercab venture going? And the decision to not use LIDAR in his vehicles? Or the Cybertruck’s dismal engineering and sales?

Elon promises 10 revolutionary things and only delivers 9. Sheesh, what a loser!

Delivering 9 of 10 revolutionary things would, I agree, be amazing.

However...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_autono...

making 31 public predictions about his self-driving cars over 20 years and only being right about one of them is not so clever.

Re: The realities of being a pop star

#64

Post by bdangubic »

joshcsimmons wrote: post #60

It is correct to be skeptical of people who parlay their fame in one domain into another. The most powerful man in the US right now is just a reality TV star. At best, it allows "celebrities" to hop into any domain of their choosing without any real qualification or having earned their way in that particular field.

what qualification does one need to be US President (besides being born in the US and of certain age)? celebrities certainly won’t be doing any open heart surgeries anytime soon :) so there are things you absolutely do not need any qualitications for (Actor/Actress, US President) and there those you do (Surgeon, Attorney…)

Re: The realities of being a pop star

#65

Post by jdlshore »

pinkmuffinere wrote: post #43
carabiner wrote: post #2

Fascinating. Also impressive rawness, and it doesn't even seem like she passed it thru Chatgpt. It's insane that my first inclination is to detect those telltale signs in a blog post, and here I found none.

> and it doesn't even seem like she passed it thru Chatgpt Oh my god, can we stop with the obsession of whether something has been chatgpt-ified? I like to know when things are true, or when they are good. I couldn't care less if they are chatgpt-y.

I think people disliked being fooled. Something seems good and true, and then you realize it was ChatGPT, and you realize it’s all fake. The connection you were forming with the author is gone (because they phoned it in) and the sense of truth is gone (because who knows what was hallucinated).

People like authenticity. ChatGPT ain’t it.

Re: The realities of being a pop star

#66

Post by bigiain »

pinkmuffinere wrote: post #38
jppope wrote: post #18

Courtney Love wrote a fabulous article explaining the realities of a million-dollar album (2000 - https://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/ ) and it explains so much of whats actually going on that the public doesn't fully comprehend. Its a great read if you've never read it. The realities are similar to what we are reading in this article. Most of what gets talked about is gross numbers not net. Most of the benefits…

> Your average NBA, NFL, MLB, NHL athletes are broke 5 years after they are out of the league. Fame, is mostly a curse. I'm not familiar with the financials of music / media production (I didn't read the linked article yet, sorry). But I feel this over-pitying attitude towards professional sports players is misplaced. They do often go broke after their career. That is sad. It is also completely avoidable with _very_…

You're right, of course.

But often there are obvious and "easy" answers that are anything but easy for the person who needs those answers.

"Just cheer up, depressed person!"

"Just eat less and exercise more, fat person!"

"Just stop shooting up, heroin addict!"

"Don't accept generic lifestyle creep, pro athlete who's teammates are all living it up like they live in a gangsta rap music video!"

I'm sure there are lots of pro sports players that get and heed advice just like yours, and finish out their short and bright sports career well financially set for their remaining 60-ish years when they're no longer capable of earning half a mil plus a year being athletes.

But I'm also fairly sure the career and lifestyle, and the managers, hangers on, and sycophants they're surrounded with push then hard the other direction.

I'm not from the US, so I don't have a real understanding of US pro sports and the way people end up there, but I have this impression that it's "one of the ways out of the ghetto" for at least some of them. People who won the genetic lottery, but lost the birth demographics lottery. They've never had generation wealth or even a middle class safety net. They don't have family or friends who have experience or advice about what to do with suddenly having way more money that anybody the have even known. They don't have family or close friends who can recommend trusted financial advisors or lawyers. Any advice they're getting risks coming from people they ane not certain they can trust to have their own interests at heart, and aren't trying to skim their own percentage off the top.

I don't exactly pity someone who earns 500k+ a year in a short pro sports career, and blows it all ending up poor. But I think I can understand how the system is set up - if not to actively encourage that outcome, at the very least that system probably doesn't do as much to protect against it as they could.

Re: The realities of being a pop star

#67

Post by rafaele »

globalnode wrote: post #62
saghm wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "average" player in one of those sports leagues isn't really a celebrity at the level the article is talking about. Charli XCX's last album was nominated for 11 Grammies and won six of them, and it has the 15th highest aggregate rating from Metacritic of all time. If you're comparing to athletes, this is All-Star roster, potential MVP winning-level performance for at least that season. By no means it's every play…

never heard of them before this HN article lol. the only thing that struck me was no paragraphs in the article, just one giant wall of text. and also how bored id be living that lifestyle (personally)

Did we look at the same article? I counted 6 or 7 paragraphs

Re: The realities of being a pop star

#68

Post by coro_1 »

pinkmuffinere wrote: post #38
jppope wrote: post #18

Courtney Love wrote a fabulous article explaining the realities of a million-dollar album (2000 - https://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/ ) and it explains so much of whats actually going on that the public doesn't fully comprehend. Its a great read if you've never read it. The realities are similar to what we are reading in this article. Most of what gets talked about is gross numbers not net. Most of the benefits…

> Your average NBA, NFL, MLB, NHL athletes are broke 5 years after they are out of the league. Fame, is mostly a curse. I'm not familiar with the financials of music / media production (I didn't read the linked article yet, sorry). But I feel this over-pitying attitude towards professional sports players is misplaced. They do often go broke after their career. That is sad. It is also completely avoidable with _very_…

Logistics are a nice guard rail for the pro-sport wealth management conversation. Let's presume rates of success are still low. Why.

Consciousness. We all have a wealth consciousness.

Re: The realities of being a pop star

#69

Post by trogdor »

SL61 wrote: post #36
jppope wrote: post #18

Courtney Love wrote a fabulous article explaining the realities of a million-dollar album (2000 - https://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/ ) and it explains so much of whats actually going on that the public doesn't fully comprehend. Its a great read if you've never read it. The realities are similar to what we are reading in this article. Most of what gets talked about is gross numbers not net. Most of the benefits…

It's interesting to observe that fame (and the money that usually comes with it) seems to follow something like a log scale. People usually don't become gradually more famous in a linear way. They're more likely to spend a few years with 50k listeners and then get a big hit and get 1 million listeners overnight, then the next big jump is 20 million, and so on. It's possible to be semi-famous and still able to go to t…

> I think Charli crossed that line with the success of her album Brat last year.

In Hollywood, that line gets crossed at a surprisingly low level. I am friends with Josh Sussman, who played Jacob Ben Israel on Glee. I occasionally visit him in LA, and we can’t go anywhere in public without getting constantly stopped by people wanting photos. It’s exhausting.

Re: The realities of being a pop star

#70

Post by bigiain »

globalnode wrote: post #62
saghm wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "average" player in one of those sports leagues isn't really a celebrity at the level the article is talking about. Charli XCX's last album was nominated for 11 Grammies and won six of them, and it has the 15th highest aggregate rating from Metacritic of all time. If you're comparing to athletes, this is All-Star roster, potential MVP winning-level performance for at least that season. By no means it's every play…

never heard of them before this HN article lol. the only thing that struck me was no paragraphs in the article, just one giant wall of text. and also how bored id be living that lifestyle (personally)

I was aware of her name, and roughly her genre, but couldn't have named or even recognised a single track of hers.

I looked her up and started listening as I read the article, and the while listening to the two track released so far from her upcoming album I was thinking "this is really good, why haven't I listened to her before?" then I put on her last album Brat, and realised "Oh, right. That's not my style of music. She's never been writing for me, and I know who she is writing for, and I understand why they like her and why she's so popular." And I respect that.

I'll keep an ear out for her new album, and based on what I've heard so far I fully expect to enjoy it, way more than I'm enjoying Brat. I've also added her substack to my rss feeds, no guarantee it'll stay there long term, but I'm at least curious enough to follow along for her next few blogposts.

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