Last week, as I mindlessly scrolled through the feeds on my phone, I came across something that raised my eyebrows. The pleasantly time-sucking data summary website Study Finds offered me an article titled “Concert Ticket Economics: The Shocking Amounts Fans Are Paying for Live Songs in 2025.” This aggregated article highlighted a not-very-rigorous study by the online service GIGACalculator appraising the worth of shows by mega-mainstream artists, broken down into cost per song. Lana Del Rey was the priciest get because her shows are short — under 90 minutes — and her songs are long. “Fans shell out a staggering $16.02 per song they hear,” the website reported.

Recognizing the total fluff of such analyses, I was still struck by what this measure of musical value suggested. The study, such as it is, pinpoints it as the number of familiar songs delivered. This mathematical approach belies any notion of the concert as an experience whose rewards might not be quantifiable — as a chance to be around other fans, immerse in whatever story a favorite artist is telling through a particular tour and simply enjoy the vibes generated by being in the room with a beloved artist. It’s music as nutrition, with an emphasis on protein.

Contrast this by-the-numbers breakdown with an actual concert experience I had last week. The legendary singer-songwriter Paul Simon was halfway through the first of three nights at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium when drummer Matt Chamberlain settled into the light Jamaican rhythm of Simon’s 1977 hit “Slip Slidin’ Away.” The audience, which had sat quietly for part one of the program — a full performance of Simon’s lovely, moving but not very catchy recent song suite Seven Psalms — was clearly itching to connect with a familiar melody, and by the song’s second chorus was joining in a sing-along. Then, before the chorus’s third line, the raised voices faded out.

Simon hadn’t made any silencing gestures; to me it seemed that his fans had seemingly made a silent mutual decision that what the artist needed at that moment was their attention, not their raised voices. The respectfully receptive mood remained until late in the set, when Simon offered a string of hits that no fan could resist — “Me and Julio Down By the Schoolyard” was made for listeners to try and reach that falsetto high note on “Ro-o-sie!” in the chorus. This was music as communion, a gift given by an artist and returned through an audience’s sensitive response.

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I offer these two stories to highlight the contrasting conceptions of what constitutes fandom in 2025. In the first case, the fan is a customer looking for the best deal. In the second, she is a patron, supporting a creative favorite not only with money but through sustained attention and care. Both terms stick the artist within a somewhat servile position, delivering goods, but the latter feels more genteel and possibly more sustaining. “Customer” implies a one-way relationship, with the artist cast as a seller; “patron” suggests an ongoing connection through which a fan ardently supports an artist for a time or over a whole career.

There’s an interesting debate in the library world about such definitions and how they affect interactions within that space. “Patron” is more traditional and, studies have shown, preferred by older library goers; some librarians, however, recoil from its historical implications, which place the patron above those who serve them. “Customer” feels informal and right to visitors under 35, but professionals worry that its use could undermine values like privacy and intellectual freedom by suggesting libraries respond to market demands. Over the years librarians have suggested other terms: user, client, visitor, member. None describe all the ways people engage with libraries — some with great loyalty, others only when necessary, most in different ways at different points in their lives. A young mother may think of herself as a patron when she brings her kids to story time every Friday and spends 50 dollars at her branch’s annual book sale, while a local whose computer is on the fritz and who needs to fill out a form may strictly remain a customer.

This detour into Library World (one of my favorite places!) sheds interesting light on what the term “fandom” might contain. It’s become central to most discussions of 21st century music culture, following the shift in the entertainment economy from a fairly conventional industry model to a more service-based one. In the era of physical recordings, a set schedule determined releases and tours and artists could remain somewhat removed from their audiences beyond the concert hall and carefully managed public appearances.

Today, “always on” artists have to be far more responsive to their fans’ desires. This means providing more music, but also many other means of consumption and interaction, from VIP concert experiences to TikTok videos, special merch lines, and, for an increasing number of artists, OnlyFans or Patreon accounts that grant direct access. Much commentary exists on the ever-growing power of the fan, but I’m interested in how fans negotiate this partly real, partly imagined surge in influence, and what it means for artists at a moment when their role in society has never been less clear.

Applying the terms of the library debate to music fandom, I can see pluses and minuses for each one. Let’s just focus on “customer” and “patron” right now. For most of recent history, fans have essentially been customers — highly invested ones, but customers nonetheless. They bought records, went to shows, wore their bands’ t-shirts — but, isolated occurrences like Beatlemania aside, didn’t expect to have actual relationships with the artists whose music they loved.

This was manageable, but the wall that the system created caused some problems. It enclosed top artists within a bubble accessible only to the chosen few; this is how groupies became a phenomenon and an unofficial music-business “safety valve,” an antidote to the loneliness of the road that cast women (and some young men) as helpmeets and playthings. (In 1973, Brian Eno called the availability of groupies “bone therapy,” adding, “They fulfill a need and are used and are useful.”) Furthermore, the consumer model provided little sustenance for less mainstream artists, who had to either rely on the communal spirit of their subcultural scenes, like folk or punk, or struggle in a weird zone where the promise of more always beckoned but material comforts were few.

As the music industry got bloated, then retracted, then got bloated again, those subcultures helped a lot — I’m thinking about the “get in the van” spirit of indie rock, which broke down the wall of glamor around music stardom as bands took to crashing in fans’ living rooms on self-booked tours and jumping into mosh pits during shows. In such circles, fans became patrons, and they remain so for groups still touring after decades; the hot meal they once bought your favorite indie band after a show might now be a subscription to the band’s Patreon or Substack.

Once the Web came to dominate our daily lives and physical media started to recede as a moneymaker, patronage took over. Feeling relatively natural for grassroots and mid-level artists who’d already relied on the sustenance of fan loyalty, it posed interesting challenges to musicians who ascended to the mainstream. The wave of teen acts in the early 2000s were the first to go digital, chatting on specially designated bulletin boards, but they weren’t fully interactive. Taylor Swift changed that. She gamified the relationship while also nodding backward to The Beatles, who’d perfected the art of the meet-and-greet decades earlier; her 2014 cookie-baking campaign will go down in history as a paradigm shifter.

Swift’s cultivation of her fans was the new model, and flipped the patronage concept on its historicized head: She was the royal granting visitations to her subjects and the commissioned artist hiding easter eggs in her songs for them to find. The K-Pop wave of the mid-2010s perfected Swift’s moves as BTS and other groups built entire online worlds around their personae and invited fans in, literally, establishing private chatrooms and other online environments where (it seemed at least) artists talked directly to their fans. Around this time, the sociological term “parasocial relationship” became commonplace, updated from its first use, describing imagined connections viewers formed with television show characters, to encompass the many ways fans interact with — or seem to interact with — the artists they love.

Within this evolution, a latent role for fans who cared enough to be patrons emerged: that of the advocate. The much-trumpeted power of current fandom is mostly related to this role. Fans coordinate to help their favorite artists score high on the Billboard charts and outsell their rivals in tour tickets, to win awards and intensify their media presence. Institutions and corporations have responded to this shift in the ecosystem. The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, for example, introduced a “fan vote” category on its ballot in 2013. 11 out of the 13 winners of that fan vote have made it into the Hall since then.

Advocacy and patronage have now blended together, especially when it comes to artists who aren’t in the superstar one per cent, as fandom has been imbued with a strong sense of mission. For musicians outside the mainstream, platforms like Patreon, Bandcamp, Cameo and GoFundme have become significant sources of income. Especially when musicians share their vulnerabilities — their illnesses, their financial problems, the crises caused by a van getting stolen or a band member’s visa being denied — interaction on these platforms invites fans to show up as supporters, offering not only financial help but publicity and even something more, like writing a letter to a congressional representative.

The Web’s highly personalized platforms take parasocial relationships into a new realm; the line between a real interaction and an imaginary one can become blurred. My colleague Isabella Gomez Sarmiento’s recent piece on musicians turning to the soft porn-leaning platform OnlyFans reveals both how things have changed and how, for women artists, especially, it all feels familiar. She quotes the wonderful folk musician Lizzie No, whose OnlyFans offerings have ranged from the mildly erotic to the satisfyingly emotional. “I’m learning a lot about what people are willing to pay for and what people consider to be valuable, which is actually really beautiful,” No told Gomez Sarmiento. “It’s been incredibly empowering to be able to monetize that digital intimacy that people have been taking for free for a long time.”

This is new territory for fandom. The encroachment of the parasocial on every level and aspect of music culture demands a strong consideration of what’s ethical. Newly minted stars like Chappell Roan have expressed exhaustion at the level of access fans seem to demand, even asking, at times, that their champions lay off. Kelsea Ballerini’s music is unusually confessional for a mainstream country artist, and she has been open about her difficult divorce from fellow musician Morgan Evans. On her current tour, however, she’s challenged fans who have screamed obscenities directed at Evans when she’s performed songs about their breakup. “I sing the song for you now,” she said to one crowd. “It’s not about me anymore.”

An ethic of fandom would include cultivating awareness of what actually helps an artist versus what feels good to a fan. Beyond that, I think, it would involve fans educating themselves about the increasingly exploitative economics of the music industry and imagining how musicians fit within society in general — as workers, citizens, members of various intersectional communities, and people with families, personal and artistic goals, and emotional lives of their own. Some folks I know are organizing along these lines right now as the Fan Alliance, striving to connect the fun of fandom to artist advocacy in the economic and political realms.

The truth is, most fans move among the positions of customer, fan and advocate over months or years of supporting favorite artists. A newly engaged enthusiast may join an online Army or Hive; she might become immersed, make friends there, even make it a center of her life. Or she could get bored after a few months and retreat into something more like a customer relationship. A musician’s publicly shared struggles often inspire a wave of advocacy; quotidian needs that build up over time, however, often go unnoticed. A fan may feel a warm glow after 50 dollars buys her a t-shirt at Tier 3 of a donation page, but if she uses a streaming service to play the music she loves, she’s participating in the new economy that actually makes artists needy.

For most fans, the decision to act in a particular way is emotional, not necessarily grounded in a greater awareness of the business of music. Yet music conglomerates do adjust to fandom’s changing nature. The stranglehold only a few superstars have over entertainment media, dominating playlists, coverage and special appearances, is in part a response to highly focused fan culture. Think about how very active fan groups speak up (and act) only for their particular stars, often actively engaging in imagined “wars” between top acts. When a fan perceives herself as deeply loyal to one artist, that can prevent her from paying much attention to others. The one-time music consumer who listened to the radio and went to a record store to explore an array of offerings becomes the stan who only wants more from her fave. That’s not healthy for the music economy as a whole — and certainly not so for most working artists.

I thought of this complex web of meanings at that Paul Simon concert, watching an artist who has achieved icon status, yet who still must ask for grace from his fans. At 83, Simon is still able to bust out some cautious dance moves while performing “Graceland,” but his voice cracks now and then, and most significantly, hearing loss has made it difficult for him to hear his musical collaborators onstage. One reason for the particularly intense feeling of solidarity with him at the Ryman, I think, was the band’s diligence; every member of this large ensemble was doing his or her best to create a space in which Simon could thrive. These players were performing, but they were also showing what collaboration can look like at its most intent and least performative. That in itself asked a lot of the audience. Maybe that’s why people took a breath before they overpowered Simon with a singalong. And maybe this acceptance of even a hugely famous musician’s physical being, that unavoidable openness to both love and harm, is the start of a greater awareness of how fandom can translate into actual community: not through displays of power or the momentary of shared enthusiasm, but through care and respect.