This summer, norms of pop flipped when musicians started telling off their fans. Leading the pack was Chappell Roan, the 26-year-old breakout star of 2024. In a statement on Instagram, she outlined the “too many nonconsensual physical and social interactions” she had had with fans, including people hassling her family and friends. One fan even grabbed and kissed her while she was in a bar, she said. “I do not accept harassment of any kind because I chose this path,” she wrote, “nor do I deserve it.”
Roan isn’t alone. In the past year, Halsey has called out her “mean” fanbase in a now-deleted post on Tumblr. The band Muna chastised certain fans for bullying and cyberstalking. Doja Cat called fans who tried to give themselves a collective name, à la Lady Gaga’s Little Monsters, “creepy as fuck”. Even Taylor Swift, whose relationship with the Swifties has previously felt sacrosanct, prodded at overbearing fan behaviour on her album The Tortured Poets Department. Artists, it seems, are finally pushing back against intrusive fan culture.
“The relationship between fans and artists is a power balance,” says Dr Lucy Bennett, a lecturer in journalism, media and culture at Cardiff University. “Sometimes the power can tip back and forth.”
Fandom, she explains, is a deeply emotional thing where people can feel a sense of home and belonging. It can lead to an intense connection to the music, something only heightened by the access to artists provided by social media. “But the problem that we have is how fans can forge a direct connection when they’re one among potentially millions that follow the artist. Those artists can’t reach out to every fan online. But to those who aren’t noticed, how does this make them feel? And what lengths may some fans go to get noticed?”
Tegan Quin has intimate experience of this. As one half of the twin sister duo Tegan and Sara, she has been a professional musician for more than 25 years. In that time, the duo have cultivated a close community of fans, something they developed in the early days through message boards and blogs. They would hang out at the merch stand talking to fans for hours after gigs.
“Right from day one, I understood that our band was having an effect on people and that people were finding a safe space in our audience,” says Tegan. “That brought me a lot of joy.” But as the group’s popularity grew, things began to shift: “We started to get people being physical. They would grab us or grope us.”
In 2011, things took a drastic turn when Tegan learned that someone had been impersonating her online. Not only that, but they had hacked the band’s email and their manager’s computer. Using the information gathered, including private information about Tegan’s mother’s cancer diagnosis, they began to catfish fans, posing as Tegan to develop intimate online relationships, some lasting years.
The group only learned about this after fans who had been communicating with the fake Tegan came forward. “We didn’t even have the word catfishing then,” says Tegan. “It was so bewildering, especially because the first couple of victims that came orward, they weren’t just emailing with fake Tegan; fake Tegan had created email addresses for my girlfriend, for my best friend, for my manager. It was just absurd.”
Tegan has since made a film about the experience, Fanatical: The Catfishing of Tegan and Sara, which is part true-crime documentary, part searing analysis of modern fan culture. “We live in a world where we feel entitled to people’s personal information, with a culture that truly rewards for revealing more about yourself,” she says. “The more personal you are, the more connected people become. That’s supposed to be a positive thing, but it also makes them feel entitled. It gives them ownership.”
This entitlement, says Bennett, is where the balance between fan and artists becomes skewed. “I think there’s a clear tension here between offline and online behaviour where these parasocial connections, these feelings of knowing and direct connection, tip into offline situations where some fans act in inappropriate ways.”
Singer-songwriter Lizzy McAlpine has also experienced being grabbed in the street and even having fans write letters to her parents’ house. But fans who approach her in person are mostly kind “and it’s really special”, she says; it’s the internet that’s the bigger problem, something that intensified after her 2022 song Ceilings went viral on TikTok. “People were just assuming things about me and assuming that they could tell me what I should and shouldn’t do,” she says.
In 2023, when it was announced she would be supporting the musician John Mayer on tour, she became the target of an attack by certain Swifties. Their beef? Swift had once dated Mayer. To them, supporting Mayer was a slight against Swift, one worthy of sending death threats. To McAlpine, it was terrifying. “I hated it,” she says. “They were so mean to me. It was kind of shocking, honestly.” McAlpine ultimately pulled out of the tour, citing a last-minute scheduling conflict.
It’s an example of the immense power that fans now wield – with no greater example than the success of the fan-led #FreeBritney campaign that suspected Spears was being abused and was ultimately vindicated. “They were trying to save her,” says Bennett. “Those fans had power and it tipped in their favour. That campaign played an important role in the representation of fans and how important they see themselves in the lives of musicians.”
Someone who has grappled with this themselves is Emily, a 26-year-old Taylor Swift fan from Idaho. Emily, who asked to be referred to under a pseudonym for fear of being doxed, was once a dedicated Swiftie, spending thousands of dollars on merchandise and concert tickets. During the Lover era of 2019, however, she began to see contradictions in Swift’s image and found her sudden embrace of politics inauthentic and calculated. “I was upset because it seemed the person I thought she was wasn’t real,” she says.
She was also put off by the growing toxicity among a fandom that no longer felt like a community. Prior to Swift’s hit album 1989, “Taylor had said that she wasn’t going to interact with fans on social media because one fan might feel more important than the other,” she says. But Swift began doing secret live sessions for fans, found via fan accounts online. “It did exactly what she thought that might,” Emily says. “Fans were suddenly fighting with each other saying, ‘You’re not good enough because you don’t obsess with her on the level I do, or ‘You don’t have as much merch as I do and you don’t know every song like I do.’ It was kind of gross.”
Emily became so distraught that she would vent to her friends about her disappointment. “When I look back it now,” she says, “it’s like, wow. I was really deranged. Taylor Swift doesn’t know who the hell I am. She doesn’t care what I think. This is actually a me problem. I needed to step back and realise that.” She cites social media and the 24/7 access to information about Swift as one reason why she became so obsessed with the singer’s life. “I had to get some hobbies outside of discussing Taylor Alison Swift.”
The constant scrutiny and tribalism of social media has led McAlpine to take a step back from being online, too. “It was really weird to see people give me their opinions on my life,” she says. “I was like, I can’t want this.” She has also started putting up boundaries, by declining to always meet with fans after concerts. “I would walk to my bus and wave and say hi, but I wouldn’t really stop and take pictures with every person individually, and some people had issues with that,” she says. “I feel as if I signed up to make art. I am a human and I get anxious. I just don’t like interacting with strangers that don’t know me. It’s shocking that people don’t understand that.”
This dehumanisation is something Tegan faced with fake Tegan. In the documentary, she confronts one fan who she believes may have been behind the catfishing. The fan denies the allegations and, in fact, says they were a victim of the scam, too. “You weren’t affected in that capacity,” they say to Tegan after detailing how difficult the situation had been for them. “It barely skimmed the surface.”
In the film, Tegan flinches in disbelief. “People think we’re impenetrable and that we don’t care,” she says now. “But I also think it’s just a societal shift that’s happened. We’ve just dehumanised each other. That’s why we can say mean things to strangers on the internet and not feel like it makes us look like a fucking piece of shit.”
Both McAlpine and Tegan say that negative interactions make up a small amount of their overall encounters with fans, and praise Roan for being so forthright about setting boundaries. Still, speaking out has a price that many newer artists might not be able to afford. “I don’t know what the majority of artists, especially young artists, can do to change what the culture is,” Tegan says. “The culture demands that they tell everything about themselves and show us how they put makeup on or make pasta. I don’t know if that’s something they can say no to.”
To realign the relationship between fans and artists, Bennett believes that musicians may need to step away from sharing so much of their lives on social media. “But it’s really important that they speak up if they feel that they’re experiencing unacceptable behaviour from the fans,” she adds.
Tegan thinks we need to think bigger. “I wonder whether as a society we need to have a hard reset about fame,” she says. “We’re all performing for each other. It’s like everyone’s become famous. It creates a disconnect. We need a fresh perspective on it and to remember that we’re all just human beings. We’re all going to be on this planet for a very short period of time, and we need to chill the fuck out. I don’t know that Chappell Roan and a movie about catfishing are going to do it, but fingers crossed.”
• Fanatical: The Catfishing of Tegan and Sara streams on Disney+ in the UK and Hulu in the US from 18 October
