This is the second of a multi-part series on the psychology of audience capture. If you haven’t already, you can read the first part, on the business of audience capture, here.

It’s a question that music nerds debate endlessly: which musicians are merely playing to the crowd? Highly produced pop stars occupy this category. Like a market-driven brand, they take their creative cues from their audience. They try and figure out what they want, and then get to work on creating music based on these perceived preferences. 

In recent times, no artist embodies this more than DJ Khaled, whose songs, as Sheldon Pierce described in The New Yorker, “sound as if they are product tested before a group of Spotify data analysts”. Artists like Khaled appear to have no independent creative thought of their own, but instead, are automatons dangling from the strings of audience sentiment. They are the phenomenon of audience capture, in musical form. 

While DJ Khaled lies at one extreme of this spectrum, he’s far from alone. In subjective, creative industries like music, this kind of market orientation is extremely common. But why do some musicians fall into audience capture, while others cultivate a style which sounds much more unique and independent? The answers lie in the dynamics of creative markets, and the psychology of status and recognition. 

Let’s dive in.

The Psychology of Audience Capture in Creative Output

As we’ve seen, audience capture is an inherent feature of marketplaces, and is further exacerbated by the feedback loops of social media. However, it plays a particular role in creative fields such as art and music. As a subjective discipline, greatness is defined, nearly entirely, by the market itself - that is, the response of the audience. There’s no such thing as “objectively” great music. What’s considered great, is what the market determines to be great. 

The fact that the worthiness of artistic output is determined by the audience has upstream influences on the creator. From a young age, we’re exposed to the aesthetic preferences, standards of beauty, and artistic norms of the culture we grow up in. Whether we realize it or not, we naturally become attuned to what we think others consider “good” art. 

Research in developmental psychology supports this. In a fascinating series of studies, kids were divided into two groups and instructed to paint a picture. One group was told to paint “the best” painting, while another group was simply told to paint. 

These simple instructions dramatically changed the artistic output. The group that was simply told to paint created art that was unique and aesthetically powerful, while the group attempting to create “the best” art made art that was more formulaic and genre-bound. When that group was asked why they painted in this way, they responded that they felt it was more likely to win. 

Discussing this study in his 2022 book, The Good Enough Life, Philosopher Avram Alpert likens this to finding “the best” flute player: 

“..competition decreases our performance, because it distracts us from doing the thing we want to do—play our instrument—and instead focuses us on an exterior goal: winning.35 In the very act of seeking the best, we are already no longer talking about the best flute player; we are talking about the person who plays the flute best under conditions of pressure and performance. We are finding the best competitor, not the best flute player.” (p. 57)

What’s true of children’s art and flute players is also true of creativity psychology, more generally. When creative people focus on being the best, this conjures up their internalized model of the audience’s preferences. They inevitably turn their attention to what they feel the audience values most highly, and away from their own conceptions of “great art”. In other words, audience capture begins to seep in. 

The Impact of Status and Recognition on Audience Capture

So why is it then, that some artists, like Khaled, appear to become captivated by these internalized models? While others seem to escape audience capture altogether?

Interestingly, research suggests that status and recognition play a strong role. If you receive adequate recognition and “make it” as an artist, you get the freedom to continue in your idiosyncratic style. But if you don’t, you become a prisoner of audience capture; like the children drawing to win, your style becomes more conformist and genre-bound. 

This pattern was borne out by research by Giacomo Negro at Emory University. Along with researchers Balázs Kovács and Glenn R. Carroll, they studied the musical patterns of nominees before and after the Grammy Awards. What they found was that after awards, the musical styles of these artists shifted in noticeable ways. 

This may seem obvious. Getting nominated provides massive recognition and social cache, which can launch an artist into stardom. But there’s an important wrinkle: it’s not just getting nominated that sparks this change - the shift is very different for the nominees who win, compared to those who don’t win. For the winners, their future albums become more stylistically unique. 

When the researchers compared these future albums with the combined corpus of albums from other artists, they found that the musical styles of Grammy winners became more unique and differentiated. In other words, their style becomes more “one of a kind” after winning, compared with how it was before.   

But what about the artists that didn’t win? They do the opposite! After losing out on a Grammy, their future albums become more conformist. When the researchers examined the music of Grammy losers to the combined corpus of music from other artists, they found that their music became more similar to that after the loss. That is, their style became more “like the mainstream” after the loss, compared with how it was before. 

Audience Capture and The Psychology of Creative Markets

This research suggests that the Grammys provide a fork in the road for the nominees. Win and you can confidently forge your own path. But lose and you’re back with the rest of the pack, trying to find your way.  

The question is, why? Here’s where the psychology of creative markets comes in. For the winners, it is more straightforward. When you win, your style is recognized and effectively “certified” by a trusted institution. You’re conferred a higher status. Rightly or wrongly, people have more confidence that their creative output is appreciated by the musical market. In start-up terminology, your style has achieved product-market fit. 

As a winner, you also get the accolades, attention, and opportunities that enable you to scale that unique style in new ways, as well as the self-belief to try new things. These influences coalesce, providing the perfect platform to confidently make music that reflects your own authentic, idiosyncratic creativity. 

But what about the Grammy losers? Why does losing out lead a musician to become more conformist in their style? You guessed it: audience capture. If you get close and lose, you’re getting a signal from the market effectively saying, “You're close, but you’re not quite there”. 

As a Grammy loser, you’re being told that your most genuine sound got you close, but it’s not quite good enough to win. Most artists take this to heart, albeit perhaps, implicitly. And to bridge this divide, they turn to what they think the musical market likes. Their creative process becomes more market-driven, and they are taken in by audience capture. 

This explains why losing out on a Grammy makes one’s music sound more conformist. Grammy Winners aside, virtually every other musical artist trying to make it is also trying to do the same thing. And so by trying to bridge the gap between “good” (nominated) and “great” (winning), their creative process becomes market-driven like everyone else’s, resulting in a style that is less independent and more conformist. 

Audience Capture Beyond DJ Khaled

On the one hand, we can look at a musician like DJ Khaled and dismiss their audience capture as a kind of personality flaw. Why not have the courage of one’s convictions? Why not make the music that you want to make, independent of what you think the audience will think?

When we look deeper though, we see that DJ Khaled is far from unique. There are DJ Khaleds in every creative industry, and there always have been. Once we begin to understand these economic and psychological forces, we can see audience capture as a much more natural byproduct of creative marketplaces. 

At the same time, however, it may not be completely inevitable that we fall into the audience capture trap. We may be able to take strides to actively avoid it, and in doing so, cultivate a creative style that is more independent of the audience, and more reflective of our own idiosyncratic creativity. How can we do this? Stay tuned. 

Photo by Karsten Winegeart on Unsplash

This is the second of a multi-part series on the psychology of audience capture. Be the first to read the next segment by signing up to the newsletter (for free)

References for The Psychology and Marketplace Dynamics of Audience Capture

Akerlof, G. A., & Shiller, R. J. (2010). Animal spirits: How human psychology drives the economy, and why it matters for global capitalism. Princeton university press.

Asarch, S.,  Mendez, M., Cheong, C. and Lloyd, A. (May, 2023) Inside the rise of Nikocado Avocado, the extreme-eating YouTuber whose dramatic meltdowns have led to years of controversy and feuds, Business Insider

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Gurwinder (June, 2022) The Perils of Audience Capture, The Prism (Substack)

Keynes, J. M., Moggridge, D. E., & Johnson, E. S. (1971). The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes (Vol. 30, pp. 1971-89). London: Macmillan.

Lanteri, A., & Carabelli, A. (2011). Beauty contested: how much of Keynes' remains in behavioural economics' beauty contests?. The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 18(2), 269-285.