When did pop music become so capitalist?

First, a caveat: I know that pop music has always been capitalist; it’s always been about buying and selling a product and making money. But it seems, somehow, to have reached insane heady levels. I haven’t paid much attention to contemporary pop for years but this question occurred to me after reading about Justin Bieber’s UK tour this week. There’s the car crash stuff, of course, that shows the beginnings of a teen star in meltdown: starting a concert two hours late, being taken off midway through another concert for breathlessness, losing his cool with the paps.

This is all pretty sad, and will no doubt be the subject of some ponderous articles about the price of fame for a youngster thrust into the limelight. What struck me, though, when reading about his Believe tour, is this VIP ticket nonsense, obscenely expensive tickets you can buy for the o2 concerts which entitle you to various perks, including goody bags, signed programmes and, in the most expensive package, getting to meet the star himself.

The same is available for One Direction’s upcoming tour and presumably for lots of other pop concerts. Not only is this pretty exploitative but it is obviously designed for the richer of these pop fans (or, rather, the fans’ parents); it imposes big have-and-have-not divisions onto the pop concert experience, something which, I reckon, should be pretty democratic. Now, don’t get me wrong, if such a package was available back in the days of my mad devotion to Jason Donovan in the late eighties, I would definitely have pestered my mum for it (who, I am pleased to say, would definitely have told me to go and whistle for it). But what would the point have been?? I had the records, articles in Smash Hits, the posters on my wall, the dance routines in my bedroom, all of which were huge fun. What, really, would a star-struck meeting have added to this?

This morning out of interest, I had a look at some of Bieber’s music videos on the internet. The music itself seems pretty dreadful, but I accept it’s not for people like me and the same could easily have been said of the dross churned out by PWL so adored by eight-year-old me. What made the videos so unwatchable was their cynicism: Bieber’s every move, facial expression and tortured look into the camera was obviously so utterly manufactured and finely tuned to appeal to the imagined desires of his teeniebopper audience.

The appeal of pop stars like Jason Donovan and Justin Bieber has always been to some extent what fans can project onto them – excitement, a sense of possibility, burgeoning sexuality, all that stuff. You don’t need to have an awkward meeting with the object of your fanatic devotion to get that or to be bludgeoned around the head with it when you watch their videos. But now pop fans must have their impulses and desires obsessively controlled and packaged. The music industry seems increasingly unwilling to leave anything to their imaginations, which is surely where so much of pop’s magic resides.