Summary
Basics
Entertainers Sell Everything About Themselves
Paparazzi
How Media Image Works
Controlling Media Image
Press and Interviews
Article Filler
Indirect Quotes
Direct Quotes
Sources
Audio
Video
What to Trust
Social Media
Management Relationships
Contracts
When Contracts Are Intact
Review
One Direction’s Formation
How They Were Put Together
Signing the Contract
Basics
Let’s start with some basics- the entertainment industry, how business works in the entertainment industry, what PR is, how PR plays a role in the articles that get published, and how social media is being used by the newer generation of artists.
Entertainers Sell Everything About Themselves-
The entertainment industry is just that: an industry. Millions and billions of dollars are made off of the products of entertainers. Movies tickets, DVD sales, digital media and streaming account fees, sports tickets, and TV viewership are just the tip of the iceberg.
Those only cover the direct products of actors, singers, and athletes. If you look at how many people are fans of these entertainers and how many people view them as role models to admire or live up to, you realize how much reach they have and how much exposure they can give an organization or brand.
So many eyes are on celebrities that anything a celebrity does is a form of advertisement. If a professional athlete drinks Gatorade, hundreds of millions of people see that. If an actor wears a suit to a red carpet event that gets televised or reported on in articles, hundreds of millions of people see that. If a boy band member wears their hair a certain way until it becomes a signature hairstyle, salons tend to get a heavy increase in the amount of customers requesting that style.
These things obviously happen organically. Athletes need to rehydrate, actors need to wear clothes, and boy band members need to do something with their hair. However, instead of throwing away the potential of this influence, you can monetize it.
The management teams behind celebrities can contact or get contacted by companies like Nike and make a deal to endorse that company’s products in particular. Nike either pays for the privilege or gifts the celebrity with free products, and Nike gets tons of brand exposure to all of that celebrity’s fans in return.
Even the places a celebrity is seen can benefit. If a celebrity is pictured leaving a certain club, that club is getting exposure. If a celebrity is pictured shopping at a certain grocery store, that grocery store is getting exposure.
When you consider clothing endorsements, food and drink and restaurant endorsements, vehicle endorsements, phone and computer endorsements, and any other products or services a celebrity might use in the public eye, the amount of profit that can be made increases dramatically.
When I say entertainment is a business, understand that I mean it’s a serious business with lots of money on the line, so it’s a business first and foremost. Later on, the idea of conspiracies and deceptions may start seeming ridiculous, but think back to this point and realize that there’s nothing some people won’t do if they think it will be better for their profits. In the super-capitalist society we’ve drifted towards in the last few decades, this shouldn’t be a hard idea to believe in.
The upshot of all this is that almost nothing you see about a celebrity is an accident. The image of a celebrity is very important to how well they can succeed in selling products. Public Relations or PR is the term for crafting the image that celebrities need to utilize to sell products and make money. What celebrities are seen wearing, what they’re seen eating, the items they’re seen using, and the places they’re seen going are almost always calculated moves.
Paparazzi-
Even when someone is “caught” by paparazzi, 9 times out of 10, it was a planned photoshoot. Paparazzi make their money by getting the best pictures to go along with stories. Not all pictures taken by paparazzi will be used, so they have to try to get the prize shots that will earn them money.
A paparazzi has little way of knowing exactly where a celebrity will be without a tip off and that means long hours of wandering around and looking for someone with no guaranteed payoff. The only exception is outside of a celebrity’s house. Many celebrities simply set up security walls and use decoy vehicles with tinted glass so paparazzi never know when they actually leave and can’t follow them.
For a paparazzi, trying to find a celebrity by chance is a very ineffective way to do their job. However, celebrity PR teams and paparazzi can help each other out. Celebrities need publicity and it’s useful if their PR team can control exactly what image is portrayed by articles about them (and the pictures within), and paparazzi need good pictures to make money.
If PR teams set up “candid” photos for paparazzi to take and inform the paparazzi of where the celebrities will be, it benefits both sides. Hence, most of the pap pictures you see are not organic, but planned. I hear that an exception to that is in LA where there’s such a high concentration of celebrities that paparazzi do sometimes roam around and get lucky.
How Media Image Works-
Celebrities need exposure. They need their fans to see them to keep up interest and they need new people to see them to hopefully increase their fandom and reach. This is why “any press is good press” is often true. Even if a celebrity is in the middle of a scandal that makes them look bad, at least people are paying attention to them. They aren’t irrelevant in that moment.
However, enough bad press in the wrong ways can also sink a career. If someone manages to become a perpetual laughing stock or villain to the general public, they aren’t looked up to or admired any longer.
There’s also brand consistency to consider. If someone has a pure and virginal image, promoting condoms probably won’t have the best effect. If someone is viewed as a hardcore rocker, promoting My Little Pony probably won’t appeal to their regular market. It’s important to stick with a general theme when building a celebrity’s image.
It can be adjusted over time, but there needs to be a coherence to how they’re portrayed so that the public can put them in a nice, neat, understandable box. The readers and potential buyers have to believe what you’re telling them fits with the majority of what they know about the celebrity in order for new stories and subliminal advertising to have an impact.
What the general public believes is conditioned over time, so the longer you paint someone as being a cheater, the longer it will take to undo that image and get the public invested in stories about them being soppy and hopelessly romantic with their long term significant other. Human brains like to categorize things and if something doesn’t fit, it gets rejected. You can’t turn a cheater image into a committed boyfriend image overnight, but you can ease people into it over time if you know what you’re doing.
What all this means is that the information people get from the press is very important to the managers behind celebrities because it can affect their bottom line if the wrong image is being created and reinforced. Managers hire PR teams to help them control the celebrity’s image, largely focusing on what types of stories are published about that celebrity. How a story is presented can be almost as important as the topics of the stories that are published.
Controlling Media Image-
The way a story is presented is called a story’s “spin”. For instance, when a breakup between two celebrities happens, you can present a woman as having cheated on a man. That in itself is a spin because it’s going to make people sympathetic towards the man and not towards the woman.
However, there can be more subtle spins such as claiming that the woman was just having lunch with a friend and the man is overly jealous and irrational. In that case, even with reports that the woman cheated, you can make people question how true that really is and the sympathy is back on the side of the woman.
The business behind news media is to get the most viewership or readership. This means that for a PR team to control their client’s image, they need to make it worth the media’s while and give them something that will make the media want to publish the stories the PR team wants people reading. Giving a publication something that will likely bring them higher viewership or readership is how you can control what they print. This can be achieved in several ways.
If a story is already big news, such as a new pregnancy or an engagement for big celebrities, the PR team can control when and how the story is released by controlling how much information the media gets. The more juicy details a publication gets, the more readership they’ll get. That’s why having an exclusive is so exciting for publications: they have more information than everyone else and they usually have it sooner than everyone else.
If there’s a story that the PR team wants to suppress, then can try a trade. If a PR team knows the media has information on a story that the PR team doesn’t want to see the light of day, they can offer a specific other story as a replacement or they can promise a certain number of general exclusives to the publication that has the dirt.
Another option is that the PR team can offer a different spin to the publication that shows their client in a more favorable light and convince the publication that the new spin will get more attention than the original one.
These are all one off bargaining strategies. What can also happen is that a PR team and management company can have a working relationship with a publication. If there’s past working history, personal friendships, or related business associations, a publication may willingly publish whatever the PR team suggests and keep the general spin on the PR team’s clients in line with what the PR team wants.
They trust that even without an explicit promise, they’ll have first access to most exclusives and inside information. They know that if they throw the PR team under the bus, that working relationship will be over and they’ll lose any special access to exclusives, so this encourages publications to play by the rules of the partnership.
Printed and online articles from well known publications are a large part of what the general public sees of a celebrity, but there’s another factor that heavily affects how the general public, and even more so fans, will see a celebrity. Social media is a relatively new concept for entertainers, but it’s a powerful tool for making people feel like they’re hearing thoughts from the celebrity’s mouth and interacting directly with the celebrity.
Press and Interviews-
As an add-on to the last topic, it’s important to realize that not everything seen in the press is truthful. In fact, almost all press isn’t 100% truthful and accurate. Whether if be the filler text, an indirect print quote, a direct print quote, a picture, an audio interview, a video interview, or just footage, it can all be manipulated without practical consequence for those manipulating things.
Article Filler:
Let’s take these one by one. When I talk about the filler text in an article, I mean the paragraphs of context written by the author of it. People don’t want to read a one sentence statement. For one, some people might not be familiar with the topic and need more background information. If China is declaring war on Japan, that’s nice to know, but people want to know WHY. What happened leading up to that? Where is it likely to go?
This filler text can be useful, but it also gives the author the chance to frame things in whatever way they want. Choosing which content to give has a big implication on how someone views the news.
Using the cheating example again, if you know the woman cheated and only that, you’ll assume she’s the sole party in the wrong. If you know that the man lashed out jealously against a man the woman had been friends with since childhood and only that, you’ll assume he’s the only party in the wrong. If you know both, depending on how the information is presented, you can end up on either side of the fence.
Content isn’t the only factor though. The types of words and the way things are phrased can be very influential. If the woman is talked of in terms of “snake” and “temptress”, that’s going to attach a negative feeling to the woman in the minds of the readers because those words are generally viewed as negative. If the man is talked about in terms of “charming” and “philanthropist”, people are going to view him positive because those words are positive.
These examples can be rather blatant, but there are many more subtler words that can be used and still unconsciously influence a reader. Seeing whether different parties in an article are addressed with positive, negative, or neutral terms can tell you which side the writer wanted you to take.
Another way your mind can be influenced is through phrasing. Normally when you ask a question, you use a question word such as who, what, when, where, why, how, etc. However, sometimes you’re asking a question through a statement with a rising tone at the end. An example would be if you can imagine how you would say, “John went to the store?” in your mind. Even though that’s technically a statement, you infer from the rising tone at the end that a question is being asked.
The same thing is true of phrasing. Even if something isn’t explicitly stated, the way it’s formatted fits a pattern you recognize and you unconsciously apply other things you know about that pattern as well. For instance, saying “John is going to the store soon,” and saying “John is finally going to the store now. It’s about time,” give almost identical information to the reader. However, the first is neutral and the phrasing of the second implies the speaker is irritated that John hasn’t gone to the store yet.
When reading the filler in an article, consider what words and what phrasing are being used and how your mind is interpreting them. If you can recognize these things, you can set them aside and examine only the facts without having to rely on the judgment of the author of the article.
Indirect Quotes:
Indirect quotes are the author rephrasing what they were supposedly told by a speaker instead of putting exactly what the speaker said in quotation marks. As you might imagine, they can put whatever spin they want by slightly changing the wording or the structure of the sentence. Indirect quotes don’t have any higher a chance of being neutral than article filler does.
Direct Quotes:
You would assume that a direct quote in quotation marks comes directly from the mouth of the speaker and is completely true. This is not the case. As with filler text, quotes can be manipulated to imply things that the author wants to imply.
One way of doing this is be removing context. Context is extremely important in how we view things. It gives us the base information we need to understand exactly what’s going on. An author is not required to use the entirely of someone’s quote. They can pick and choose what they like, so if I said “The fans have been tweeting a lot. They’re crazy. It take a ridiculous amount of effort and we’re really grateful for it,” they could just report “The fans have been tweeting a lot. They’re crazy.”
With a little misleading filler, my quote that praises fans could easily be turned into me criticizing fans. They technically used exactly what I said, but the way it comes out is very, very different.
Something that doesn’t translate over print is the tone the speaker was using. This means that jokes and sarcasm can come across badly. Everyone has had at least one time that they’ve been texting a friend and couldn’t tell whether the friend was angry or tired or excited. It’s just like that.
If an author doesn’t make an effort to specify that the speaker was joking around, you can get a sarcastic quote like, “Oh, I hate John Lennon. He made terrible music and no one liked it,” and people will be led to believe that the speaker really does hate John Lennon and think that about the popularity of the music. Using hyperbole and being humorous can be very dangerous for celebrities as it can be mistranslated easily.
Another thing authors sometimes do to deliberately change the meaning of a speaker’s quote is to change the question they’re attaching it to. If the answer is “It’s exciting!”, that’s going to come off two different way if it’s in response to the question, “How do you like the response to your new album?” vs the question “How do you like the war going on in China?”
Unless you see a block quote with both the interviewer’s question and the speaker’s response, you just don’t know exactly what the speaker was responding to.
Again, it doesn’t have to be that blatant. The quote, “My mother was very sad,” in response to “Did your mother miss you when you went away?” vs the question “Did your mother feel like the music industry had stolen you away?” gives slightly different feelings. In the first, it seems like a normal reaction to someone growing up and moving away, but in the second, it’s casting a negative light on the speaker for prioritizing their career over their family.
Misusing a quote is obviously easier if the quote is blatant. “I’m excited,” can be the answer to just about any question while “My mother was very sad,” can only apply to questions that would make the speaker mention their mother. If quotes are extremely vague and don’t address the topics of the question directly at all, be wary. Either the speaker was trying very hard to dodge the question or the quote may have been relocated to a different question.
One final thing to mention is that a quote can be fabricated if it’s the artist’s team that’s doing the fabricating or if they condone whatever is being made up by the author. Normally someone who has quotes they never said being printed could try to take legal action, but as will be discussed later, celebrities are bound by contracts that often give their management and PR team the right to do whatever they see fit as being “in the best interests” of the celebrity.
Sources:
Article writers need to have sources for the information they put in their articles. Whether it’s something they made up from their own imagination, something they saw online, or something they were told, everything had to come from somewhere. However, the source of things isn’t always accurately represented.
Common sources for information are official statements or releases from a celebrity’s team, direct quotes from the celebrity or another named person who knows the celebrity personally, indirect quotes from the celebrity or another named person who knows the celebrity, “friends of” so and so, “sources”, and “insiders”.
We’ve already covered about half of these sources and what to be wary of. Official statements and releases from a celebrity’s representatives are true, but only in a certain way. Writers won’t lie about the source or the quote, but the celebrity’s team may not be telling the truth either. They’re putting out what they need the public to think. We call this the “official narrative”. It’s the official story that the celebrity’s PR team is weaving.
When it comes to named persons giving quotes about a celebrity, just remember to question how this person knows the celebrity, how close they and the celebrity really are, how much information this person is likely to have about the situation, and whether this person might have their own agenda and reasons for not telling the complete truth.
As for “friends of”, “sources”, and “insiders”, you might as well label them as imaginary friends. Know one knows who these supposed people are, so the blame can be pinned on no one if the information is completely false. A writer can make up “sources” and “insiders” as much as they like, so taking any information credited as such seriously isn’t wise.
Audio:
Audio is a little more trustworthy than print, but not by too much. The trick with audio is that it can be edited without many signs the listener can hear. This means quotes can be taken out of context just as with print.
The other consideration is that you can’t see what’s going on with the speaker. Someone could be holding a gun to their head and making them read cue cards and you would never know. That particular scenario is less than likely, but it’s quite possible someone is breathing down the speaker’s neck and monitoring their answers.
You can’t see the speaker’s face, so you can’t tell if they’re faking a happy tone or if they’re tearing up, or anything else. Whether they agree with what they’re saying or like what they’re saying is harder to determine without video footage.
Video:
Video is the most trustworthy mode of communication, but it’s not foolproof. Again, celebrities can be under orders to say certain things. They often are, in fact. Having a celebrity answer a question with no preparation can be messy and awkward. It’s like when your parents ask you what you want for Christmas, your mind blanks, and you go “Uhhhhh…”
Most, if not all, questions that are directed at celebrities during interviews have been run by the celebrity’s team and were approved. Certainly all potentially controversial questions have.
If an interviewer asks an unapproved question during a taped interview, it will simply be cut if the celebrity’s team doesn’t like it. If they ask it during a live interview and it’s damaging to the celebrity, the interviewer runs the risk of making the celebrity’s team angry and of scaring off any other celebrities that would rather not be ambushed on air.
Another way video can be manipulated is through edits. Video interviews, as with all entertainment, need to be as interesting as possible. If you’ve ever seen a show filmed in front of alive audience, you’ll have seen that there are at least 3 or 4 cameras shooting the front area all at once, plus some that shoot the audience to get reactions. Reaction shots go a long way to making things more dramatic and interesting. Even when there isn’t an audience, there will be reaction shots of the celebrity and the interviewer.
With multiple camera angles and reaction shots interspersed with the actual conversation being had with the interviewer, it’s expected that there will be cuts to change between shots. With this being normal, it’s easy for a video editor to cut out whole chunks of an interview without anyone being the wiser.
It’s also possible to take a reaction shot from a different point and put it where it doesn’t belong. You can make someone look shocked when they actually were laughing, or you can make someone look angry when they actually were listening politely. You can make those and any other switches as long as you have the footage.
Pictures:
We already covered how paparazzi work, so know that any HD picture likely came from a pap and is showing you what a celebrity’s team wants you to see.
There are other ways pictures can hide the truth as well. For one, you can crop pictures. Two people could be standing a foot apart, but you can crop one person out as if they were never there.
For another, pictures only capture one moment in time. It’s common for people to interpret someone’s resting face (not paying attention, bored, focusing) as angry. People also tend to look funny when they’re talking, so taking one frame from that moment could end up showing what looks like anger when really they were just excited.
And again, you have no way of knowing if someone was joking around or not. You can have a picture of someone that looks like they’re pushing another person into traffic, but the two could be engaged in a play fight with no one in any danger.
Angles are another concern. It’s easy to make two people look like they’re close together when they really aren’t if you find the right angle. You can make two people look like they’re kissing when one is really just whispering in the other’s ear. You can also make people look like they’re very close to holding hands when their hands are really 2 feet apart.
A final point is that photoshop exists. Professionals can use it and non-professionals can use it, but very few people seem to have a strong grasp on how to verify that something has been photoshopped. I’ve seen edits that I know were made by fans be picked up by papers and reported on as if they were real pictures.
What to Trust:
Nothing! I kid, but I don’t kid.
In order of trustworthiness, you have long video interviews (more context), short video interviews (less context, videos (seemingly unedited over clearly edited), audio (seemingly unedited over clearly edited), official statements from representatives (for the official narrative), direct print quotes, and the remaining categories of indirect quotes, pictures, filler text, sources, and insiders are equally untrustworthy.
Social Media-
Most people assume that what they’re seeing on Twitter or Facebook is being posted by the person that the Twitter or Facebook ostensibly belongs to. If there’s a status update on your sister’s Facebook, you assume your sister wrote that post. That’s fair for regular people unless someone has hacked their account or taken their phone as a prank, but carrying this assumption over to celebrities doesn’t work.
Just as every article and picture of a celebrity affects their brand, so does every post on their social media. The words and pictures the celebrities supposedly choose to show the world represent who they are. Or in this case, who their PR teams want you to think they are.
Additionally, if Gatorade can be promoted through an athlete drinking it, it can also be promoted through an athlete tweeting about it. It doesn’t have to be a transparent tweet such as “Buy Gatorade, it’s good!”. Saying “Ah! I forgot my Gatorade at the hotel. Guess I’ll have to get a new one. This day isn’t off to a great start,” can also be a form that this type of promotion takes.
Social media has the advantage of appearing more organic, so if a celebrity posts a selfie of themselves at home on their Instagram while wearing a certain brand of clothing, people are more likely to believe that the celebrity isn’t being styled and just wears that brand of clothing because they like it. Compared to an HD picture in a glossy magazine, it feels less manipulative and like it represents reality more accurately.
Social media managing is a standard part of a PR team’s work, so celebrities are NOT the only people with the passwords to their social media accounts. Social media managers know that promotion and image building that looks organic is more effective, so they often mimic the writing style of celebrities in terms of what vocabulary they use and the idiosyncrasies of their spelling and grammar. Guessing when a celebrity is posting for themselves and when a social media manager is posting can be nearly impossible.
Even when a celebrity is posting rather than a social media manager, they likely have restrictions and advice they’ve been told to follow. A celebrity knows what their image is supposed to be as much as any part of their team does.
If they’re supposed to appear clean cut and wholesome, they’ll know they’re not allowed to post insinuations of drinking, drugs, or sex. If they’re supposed to appear macho and sporty, they’ll have been told to post about sports or cars all they want.
In this way parts of a celebrity’s personality are magnified and parts are hidden to create an image that differs to some degree from the actual celebrity even if a social media manager isn’t directly using the account.
Management Relationships-
With most celebrities, they probably have things they hide. Whether it’s about wanting to maintain their privacy or knowing when to hold their tongue on controversial topics, there’s going to be something the celebrity and PR team don’t want the public to see.
Ideally, a celebrity trusts their management company since the management company is there to help maintain and develop their career. Theoretically, the celebrity and management company enter into a fair contract and work towards mutually beneficial goals. Ideally and theoretically.
In practice, there can be huge power imbalances. As you might imagine, big celebrities have a much easier time of getting their way when it comes to contract negotiation. They already have a successful brand that’s worth a lot of money, so companies will compete for them and they can pick and choose who they want to work with. Just as competing brands tend to drive prices down for consumers, competing management companies are willing to cater to the celebrity more when finalizing the contract stipulations.
Big celebrities also probably have experience in the industry which will translate into being more aware of which clauses to beware of and the privileges to demand for themselves. They likely already have money to hire good lawyers to look over contracts for them as well.
On the opposite side, you have the inexperienced, young, poor, people who are still trying to get their break in the business, and people who are any combination of these. Inexperienced celebrities tend to still have an idealized idea of how the industry works, especially if they tend to be young.
People who haven’t yet become famous or popular tend to be more desperate to take full advantage of their opportunities. They also tend to not have much money which makes them even more desperate to succeed.
Because of these things, management companies can easily take advantage of the young, inexperienced, and desperate when it comes to having them sign contracts that are much more beneficial for the management company. When this happens, the darkest side of PR kicks in- when a management company has full control over how the celebrity’s brand and image is handled and the celebrity gets no say in what type of work they do and how they’re portrayed.
I talk about management companies here because managers are the most direct and personal connection a celebrity usually has in their team. However, any company a celebrity has a contract with can be substituted and apply. For musicians this includes the music publisher, label, and management company at the very least.
Contracts-
One common objection to the idea of “dark PR” is that no one, including celebrities, can be forced to do something. Why don’t they simply quit?
This is why it’s key to understand contracts. A contract is legally binding. You can’t break or violate a contract without being sued or incurring the penalty listed in the contract. Oftentimes incurring the penalty automatically means a court date anyway. Unless you can find a loophole in the contract’s wording or can find a good lawyer to argue that the contract violates other laws or your human rights, you WILL end up paying for it.
When it comes to the entertainment business, there’s a lot of money to be gained, so there’s a lot of money involved in contracts. Often a celebrity can’t break a contract without millions in penalties. Added to that, going to court has it’s own costs, can take years before a resolution is reached, and tends to end with the celebrity’s reputation being dragged through the mud one way or another.
People may think celebrities have millions to throw around on breaking contracts, but this is rarely the case. For even the most successful of celebrities, the companies they work with tend to get much more of the profit than the celebrities. Celebrities can get less than 20% of the profit reported by their brand. It’s not rare. Even someone who’s made $100 million in profit during their career would take home only $20 million before personal expenses and purchases.
If breaking a contract costs $15 million, with expenses and purchases subtracted from the gross sum of $20 million a celebrity makes, and with no promise of a continuing career after leaving their current representation, that’s likely more than a celebrity can afford. Only very successful of celebrities are in any position to have made that much profit in the first place.
When Contracts Are Intact-
It’s clear why celebrities don’t take quitting lightly. However, that doesn’t mean a celebrity who has a disadvantageous contract is completely powerless. Violating a contract won’t usually result in an automatic lawsuit because as much as it costs the celebrity, it can cost the company.
If a management company is sued, they’re just as likely to have their reputation dragged through the mud as the celebrity. They may be required by the court to submit documents publicly that normally would be confidential, putting their secrets on display. They also accrue the same legal fees and will be tied up in court for just as long as the celebrity.
Especially if a celebrity happens to be very profitable for the company, the company may not want to sue even if the contract has been violated. This creates an uneasy balance. No one wants to go to court, but both sides have to be careful to make sure the other side doesn’t have too much ammunition to use if that does end up happening.
Celebrities have the option of finding loopholes and obeying the letter of the contract rather than the intention of it. If they aren’t allowed to change their image by getting a different hairstyle, for instance, they might get a piercing to alter their appearance if the contract didn’t cover that option.
Management companies have to resort to other methods of forcing what they want to happen at that point, threats of punishment and intimidation tactics among them. If the celebrity doesn’t play along with what they’re supposed to say on a live interview, the PR team will have the press run a story the celebrity doesn’t like, for instance. If the celebrity doesn’t back down, this can result in a fierce, but potentially invisible, struggle behind the scenes.
Review-
Entertainment is a business, meaning that profit is the ultimate motivator for the people in charge of entertainment related companies. If a company thinks doing something will increase their profit enough, there’s a good chance they’ll do it.
Everything about a celebrity can be monetized from clothing to food to technology to the establishments they frequent. A celebrity is a brand more than a person as far as the team handling their career is concerned.
As a brand, the image of a celebrity has a big impact on what they can promote and how well that promotion works. This means control of a celebrity’s image is key to being profitable.
Controlling a celebrity’s image is handled through control of the press and social media. This includes arranging for paparazzi photos, negotiating with publications to suppress or promote certain stories, and managing the celebrity’s “personal” social media for them.
Just about every source of information about a celebrity can be manipulated, so everything you see, hear, and especially read, needs to be taken with quite a bit of salt.
Any company a celebrity contracts with to handle their career can take advantage of the celebrity if the contract gives the company more power than the celebrity. The young, inexperienced, poor, and desperate are much more likely to be taken advantage of when being given a contract to sign.
Contracts can’t be broken without costing everyone involved lots of time and money and damage to their reputation. Celebrities can be forced into doing things by their team because breaking a contract isn’t a viable option most of the time.
Despite the fact that celebrities usually can’t afford to break contracts, their team often doesn’t want to deal with the consequences of suing them either. This can result in a behind the scenes struggle until the contract naturally expires.
*I haven’t worked in the entertainment industry and I’m not claiming to be an expert, but some of these things are observable from the outside, some is basic knowledge of how the world functions, and the rest is sound logic.
One Direction’s Formation
How They Were Put Together-
One Direction is more susceptible for being put down as simply a “manufactured” band because of how they were formed. Each of the five members auditioned for The X Factor UK as solo contestants and were accepted into the Boot Camp round of the show. None of them knew each other beforehand, but they were all in the same age range, 16-18 years old.
During the final cuts of the Boot Camp round, all of the individual boys were cut from the competition. As ordered, they retrieved their packed bags and got ready to go home. However, the show called 9 of the cut contestants back and had them gather on the stage again.
On that stage 2 groups, one of 5 boys and one of 4 girls, were given the option to form. Once both had agreed to forego being solo artists and commit to being a group, they were told they would move on to the Judge’s House round. After some discussion, the groups chose to be called Belle Amie and One Direction.
One Direction gelled surprisingly quickly. During the break between Boot Camp and Judge’s House, they all gathered at Harry’s step-father’s bungalow. Despite the need for practice, they report having spent most of the time messing around instead and they became very comfortable with each other.
When they returned to The X Factor, their vocals might not have been completely perfect, but they were better than average and the chemistry in the group attracted immediate attention.
They made it through the Live Show portion until they lost in the final round and came third. However, during their time on The X Factor, One Direction garnered a massive number of fans. These fans were young, social media savvy, and made it their goal to get other people interested in the band through spreading information. Unsurprisingly, One Direction was offered a contract with Simon Cowell’s label under Sony, Syco, despite only coming in third.
Signing the Contract-
This is where the problem comes in. If you’ve read the Management Relationships section of the Basics part, you’ll remember that the young, inexperienced, poor, and desperate can all be vulnerable to being led into contracts that are very disadvantageous for them. One Direction were all of these things.
The boys, as mentioned, were between 16-18, none of them having even gone to university yet. They had minor work experience, but not even on the scale of a full time job. All of them grew up in lower to middle class circumstances as well, so the idea of becoming a star and making millions was particularly appealing.
Harry, Louis, and Niall grew up in one parent families with several remarriages thrown in the mix, while Zayn and Liam have shared anecdotes that clearly imply their family struggled for money at times. There are pictures floating around of all their childhood homes and none of them are picturesque.
Most of all, they all really loved music. That was what they had always thought about doing, even if they deemed it a pipe dream. Louis and Harry had both been the lead singers in bands they created with friends, Louis and Liam had auditioned for The X Factor before, and Louis and Niall had played lead roles in school musicals. Liam had voice lessons and had been performing at every club and bar that would take him, Niall had supported another artist at a local show and planned to study sound engineering in University, and Zayn had always gravitated towards music and singing with his incredible voice.
They all wanted the opportunity to sing as a living badly. This added to the other factors meant that no matter what contract they were offered, they likely would have signed. Having just lost The X Factor, they were in a bleak mood, and then a golden opportunity, one chance to succeed, seems to appear out of thin air. Of course they would feel the need to grasp it in a chokehold.
It’s been speculated that this is actually something The X Factor manipulates to happen on a regular basis. Viewers have noted over the course of several seasons that the artists that seem like they should be the fan favorites always seem to end up as second or third instead of first.
The X Factor has several times been accused of not directly doctoring votes, but of botching song choices purposefully, giving poor advice to contestants about their performance styles, and neglecting certain contestants in order to mentor other contestants more. This would obviously affect the end result as much as misreporting votes would.
The reason this would be attractive to The X Factor is that the winner’s contract is set from the beginning. Whoever wins is locked into a specific contract that can’t be extended and can’t be altered no matter how the label and management company would like to.
The contracts offered to other contestants after the show are not guaranteed, though, and can be whatever the label and management companies like. Taking that and the crushing disappointment of losing out on a guaranteed contract together, the second and third place winners (who maybe should have been first) are set up to sign contracts that are much more in favor of the label and management company.
It’s also been revealed that when signing a contract with Syco, you are only allowed to use one of three Simon Cowell approved lawyers. This condition means that any of the lawyers the boys used to look over the contract were likely not to have the boys’ best interests in mind. They’re already associated with the other party of the contract after all. Without proper legal advice, their last chance of getting a fair contract went out the window.
It’s possible that even under different circumstances, One Direction might have been convinced to sign the same sort of contracts they originally did. We know for certain that the events that did happen led to their current contracts and set the stage for much of the strife that fans have picked up on since the band was signed.
By writing this, my intention was to make it easier for people without a large amount of knowledge about One Direction, the entertainment industry, and how the press works to examine the individual events surrounding One Direction with an open mind.