We all understand that without fans, there would be no stars, but how much power do fans really have? Discuss the power of a fan/consumer and what this could entail (how much impact do we have)?
First of all, I think there are different types of fans which make different influence on our society, and their fandom behavior depends on the level of obsession to their idols. The more obsession and the larger number of fans, the stronger power they could contain. According to the fan culture, the most obvious benefit from being a fan of someone, is the power to connecting people from the worldwide, which share the same interests and goals. It suddenly allows them to form an alliance, and makes them representable as one of the group member. This coherence within fan culture can make strong influence on economics and public opinions to idols and to society. Fans are not only supporting their idols mentally, fans are also consumers supporting idols financially, such as buying CDs, photo albums, posters, going to their concerts, and sending gifts. Those would be a great deal of money for general fans, if encountered a wealthy hysterical individual, buying a house in the same neighborhood of their idol is possible. In addition, entertainment companies also making money from fans indirectly by selling popularities of artists. As consumers, fans have huge impacts on society economically.
However, there could be conflicts between one fan group to another. Fans grasp every piece of information of their idols from everywhere at any time, even the underlying message of their idol’s interaction with another artist on the internet. Not just they want to be “closer” to their idols, but also willing to do everything to protect their idols. Conflicts happen when this process of decoding information from idols’ behavior to fan’s thoughts. For example, when an unfamiliar artist making a bad joke with their idol, these fans can be really sensitive to this information then perceiving it negatively. In the worse scenario, both fans of these two artists would “flight” each other on social media, and then entertainment journalists could catch this opportunity to find any other related evidence, then create public opinions. When ordinary people reading the news reports, they would have the first image of these two artists are not getting alone with each other, however, the truth is opposite. This would contribute negative relationship between both the artists and their fans. In general, the power of fans is unlimited.
Reference
Kim, A.(2017). Korean Popular Music (K-Pop), Youth Fan Culture, And Art Education Curriculum. (Master’s thesis). Retrieved from https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/etd/4368