The chasm between what this show believes it is—a high-art exploration of music, erotica and nebulous stream of consciousness for a critically mature and appreciative audience—and the reality of its setting—a pop concert attended mostly by confused children and their furious parents—only adds to the surreal nature of the show. The only thing more entertaining than the Bangerz tour is witnessing the stunned expression of short-straw dads watching it with their kids.
Miley can pretend she’s in a Brooklyn gallery space rather than an all-ages show, if she wants to. But she can’t pretend things are going well in terms of ticket sales. There were plenty of empty seats at the O2 and, unusually for an artist of her sway, she only played one night there. Things haven’t picked up on the rest of the European tour, with tickets still available for many of her upcoming dates. In the US, sales for the tour also struggled, particularly after she was seen smoking weed on TV. Forbes believe it’s unlikely she’d sold out “as many as half of her shows”. Tickets on secondary ticketing sites were selling for less than face-value as touts just tried to make some of their money back.
Her record sales have also been surprisingly poor. Despite being repeatedly described as “the person of the year” with unprecedented coverage across the worlds of music, entertainment and news, not to mention having two of the most watched music videos of all time, Cyrus’ album was only the 71st best selling of last year in the UK. Records by Alt-J, Kodaline, dutch jazz singer Caro Emerald and violinist Andre Rieu all performed considerably better. Globally the album did slightly better, but was still a long way off the top 20 global albums of 2013, an important measure for world-straddling artists.
How can that be? To understand why Miley isn’t selling you have to disregard everything you believe about what she is.
Conventional wisdom is that Cyrus, like every other almost famous female popstar from the past 30 years, is using sex to sell her music. She is basically Madonna, only more crude, with less self-awareness and worse music. This seems almost painfully self-evident. “Wrecking Ball” is a well-performed but largely perfunctory ballad that has become the 9th most watched video in the history of Youtube because it features a butt-naked Miley swinging across a laboured metaphor. Miley remains in the public eye because of her very public displays of her body.
Undoubtedly, she made a buttload of money from all the plays her videos. "Wrecking Ball" and "We Can't Stop" have received over 1 billion plays on Youtube alone. Most estimations suggest she will have made around $10 million from those two videos. Nothing to be laughed at, but considering the huge expenditure she has for live performances, press and general upkeep—she still needs to be making money for sales and touring and here’s where things get sticky.
The old adage that sex sells meant a lot when you literally had to buy into an artist or performer. You couldn’t read Madonna’s Sex book without purchasing it, or watch Deep Throat without going to the cinema. True, music videos have always been free at the point of access, but they once acted as adverts for a purchasable product; now people can watch "Wrecking Ball" as many times as they want, with no interest in the Miley album itself. They can tweet about what she means for feminism till they’re blue in the face, but with no real interest in the end project, there’s no guarantee that all publicity is good publicity.
Obviously, Miley won’t be declaring herself bankrupt anytime soon, the Bangerz album and tour will have brought in tens of millions of dollars. But in pop everything is relative, and there’s no doubt she’s underperforming in relation to the size of her public persona and the popularity of her performances.
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