Ask anyone who’s ever been a teenager and they’ll tell you that half the fun of pop music at that age is fancying the people who make it.
Talent management companies and record labels have been aware of this ever since people started fainting at the sight of Elvis’s hips and they have spent sixty years refining the art of packaging pop stars to make the most money possible out of impressionable young teenagers. The biggest slice of this crucially important (and lucrative) market? The heterosexual teenage girl – a demographic whose spending power has never been more aggressively chased than it is today.
The formula for creating a successful boy band has long been established and one of the archetypes that seems to be of accidental but enduring appeal to the heterosexual teenage girl is the Sole Gay Member.
We’ve seen the same thing happen again and again. It’s occurred too many times now for it to be coincidence. Jonathan from New Kids On The Block, Stephen from Boyzone, Mark from Westlife, Lance from N*Sync, Duncan from Blue, Jayme from Union J.
If you want to count Wham! as a boy band (and there’s no real reason why you shouldn’t) then we can throw George Michael into the mix – making this a 30-year trend. Ricky Martin started his career in Puerto Rican boy band Menudo and, although Steps weren’t a boy band per se, H (a.k.a. The Good Ian Watkins) very much followed the same personal trajectory.
It’s clear that there is great profit to be had in marketing bands with a closeted gay member. But what sort of margin can you make with this sort of racket? Would the band’s economics suffer if the band members’ true sexualities were revealed? And how much are hormonal young girls paying for this whole charade?
Basically what we’re asking is: is there any way to quantitatively measure the sort of profit you could make off a young gay star if they stay in the closet?
We’re not entirely sure there is, but we’re going to try anyway.
So join us as we make a few sweeping generalisations, employ a couple of mildly unsubstantiated percentages and dust off our calculator as we crunch the numbers to figure out what it actually costs, in nickels and dimes, when a pop star comes out.
The Basic Breakdown
Records
As a purely arbitrary example to help us run some numbers, let’s examine the figures that Mark Feehily from Westlife racked up.
(Westlife, for the uninitiated, are a band who had a 13-year career which spanned from 1999 to 2012 – punctuated almost perfectly in the centre with Mark coming out as gay in 2005.)
Altogether, Westlife sold over 45 million records globally. As an even split between Shane, Mark, Kian, Nicky and Brian that would be 9 million albums a piece. However, Brian left six albums into a twelve-album career (counting their greatest hits compilations) which means that the remaining quartet will have been responsible for shifting a greater number of those records. For the sake of easy mathematics then, let’s say that Shane, Mark, Kian and Nicky each sold 10 million albums.
A CD album released around the time that Westlife were really banging them out (late 90s/2000s) would have had a recommended retail price somewhere between £8.99 and £12.99. To make the calculations simple, and to avoid overstating the figures, we’ll give a conservative average of £10 per album.
That means that Westlife, as a whole, sold £450m worth of albums. As we’re only interested in Mark’s sales though, we need to look specifically at the 10 million albums he sold at a price of £10 (working out as £100 million worth of sales).
Of those 10 million records for which Mark was personally responsible, if just 1% of them was bought because the buyer had a crush on Mark, then that would equate to 100,000 album sales: the equivalent of £1 million sold on the strength of Mark’s sex appeal alone.
Now, you may think that 1% is a rather high percentage for that sort of thing, but when you consider the alternative – that 99% of Westlife albums were bought purely out of musical appreciation – then it actually seems laughably low.
(And if you think we’re just being flippant about this, go and read the number of breathless comments left by teenage girls in critical denial underneath any article about Mark Feehily’s sexuality. Honestly, you’ll be amazed.)
Of course, Mark wouldn’t have seen anything like that full figure. A lot of people would have had to take their cut out of that million-pound pot before anything got anywhere near his pockets – but he could roughly expect to see £130,000 of that when payday rolled around. Quite the haul, we’re sure you’ll agree. But it’s nothing compared to what the record label will see out of that same sum.
The record label, more often than not, pockets around two thirds of the cash generated by album sales. So they’re looking at earning themselves around £650,000 out of the sexy million that Mark made.
In total, Mark will have been worth a hundred times that to the label; he’s an album-selling cash cow of a value to them of around £65 million. But if they’re earning £650,000 just from the 1% of fans who fancy Mark (and aren’t really too fussed about the music itself) then it quickly becomes clear why it’s worth someone’s while to keep a question mark hanging over his head.
It’s not just Westlife who turned over these sort of figures either. We crunched the numbers (using the same formula) for other boy bands too.
Stephen Gately (Boyzone, who sold 25 million albums) would have earned £65,000
Lance Bass (N*Sync, who sold 55 million albums) would have earned £143,000
Jonathan Knight (New Kids On The Block, who sold 80 million albums) would have earned £208,000
This is just from album sales too. Westlife sold an ungodly number of singles all around the world (14 million) – with top tens in many different countries; 14 UK number ones; and silver, gold and platinum discs from other European, US and Australian markets.
But everyone knows that record sales aren’t important anymore. No-one makes their crust from flogging CDs, granddad. Get with it. The real money is to be made out on tour.
Touring
To any fan who followed Westlife in the distant hope that they would one day get to sign their name “Mrs Mark Feehily,” the singles and the albums were only the beginning. The starter kit. They were the bare essentials needed to mount a larger, more comprehensive campaign to attract the attentions of their future gay ex-husband, Mark. Owning CDs is rookie stuff. The real fans get sorted out at the stadium level.
Tours are a very lucrative source of income for big bands. Huge arenas, packed with superfans, each having paid the cost of multiple albums for a ticket, night after night. It’s big money – and it’s a worldwide market too. At the peak of their career, a Westlife world tour would run for 60 dates, mainly through Europe and Asia (they never really broke the States). Some were a little longer, some were a fair bit shorter, but in order to be specific, we’ll pick a tour that we have some reported figures for: The Farewell Tour of 2012.
(An important note: Mark Feehily was long out of the closet by 2012, so presumably our 1% of fizzy-knickered female fans weren’t still shelling out in the determined/deranged hope of changing his mind. That doesn’t matter. We’re really just using him as an example in order to look at the wider picture of touring. The rough numbers we’re interested in are equally applicable to any member of any similar-sized band, gay or straight.)
Let’s start by looking at the details of one individual gig: The Manchester Arena – May 26th, 2012.
Tickets for that gig cost £41.50 (excl. booking fees). Westlife managed to sell 13,960 of the 14,435 available tickets – filling the venue to 97% capacity. Presuming every ticket was sold for at least face value, that is a minimum taking of £579,340.
If that constitutes an average taking for a gig on the Farewell Tour (which ran for 41 dates) then the whole thing would have raked in a sum in excess of £23,750,000.
If all four members of the band are responsible for drawing in equal amounts of revenue, then Mark’s contribution to that total is equivalent to £5,937,500.
So how much of that was paid for by his adoring lovesick fans? Well, we fully admit that the 1% lust-motivated fan base figure we were using before is one that we whipped out of thin air. Sadly, there is no accurate way to gauge exactly what proportion of pop fans give in to their groins when deciding on their purchases, but anyone who has ever been to a Westlife arena gig will testify that way more than one in every hundred is there because they find the boys dreamy.
Even though the actual percentage would be much, much higher we will nevertheless continue to use it as our guide as we thrash out a few more numbers.
Over the course of the tour, Mark’s 1% of sex-focused fans will have stumped up £59,375 in total. That’s pretty good going but, once again, there are other expenses to consider (venue hire, transport costs, a band to pay, promotion, etc…) before Mark gets anything of the remainder.
We’ll return to this gross figure a little later, but how much would each member of Westlife end up taking home after a world tour? Well, thanks to the publicity surrounding Shane Filan’s bankruptcy earlier that same year, we actually have a rough idea what they got for this particular tour.
Shane says he got about £4 million for the 2012 stint – so, presuming that he wasn’t shown any preferential treatment to help him out of his financial difficulties, it is highly likely that the other members of the band also earned £4 million too.
Therefore the frisky 1% would have accounted for £40,000 of Mark’s fee. 40 grand, just for one world tour. Not a bad annual bonus. If that tour was in any way representative of the others (there were twelve Westlife tours in total; eleven of them global) then that’s nearly half a million pounds over the course of the band’s life
Just from the tongue-waggers.
“Hold on though,” you might be saying. “£4 million seems like rather a lot for one individual member to take if the total ticket sales only amounted to £24 million.” Well, yes. You’re right. It would be. Well done. But the £4 million that each of the band members took away wasn’t just from ticket sales alone. Boy bands draw their take-home fee from the total tour turnover – which, alongside ticket sales, includes merchandise.
Merchandise
OK, let’s leave poor Mark Feehily alone now. We don’t want anyone thinking that we’re picking on him specifically, so let’s choose another band as our example to scrutinise for merchandising.
One Direction are the biggest sensation in pop; the current darlings of the screaming teen market. Right now you can buy all sorts of 1D branded goodies. At their official store you can buy all of the usual calendars, diaries, posters, T-shirts, mugs and things like that, but you can also buy slightly more specialist items too. There’s bikes, rollerblades, scooters, crash helmets, a dedicated jewellery section. You can buy their official fragrance “Our Moment”. You can buy a One Direction branded dance mat game. You can buy 1D ballet shoes.
There is not a single piece of it that hasn’t been precision engineered to appeal to young girls – the utterly unsubtle implication with the bedspread being that they can physically sleep with the boys every night.
This is really where the fans who are interested in the individual members (rather than their music collectively) properly start to flex their financial muscle. The magazine Business Insider did some equally spurious number crunching on the earning potential of One Direction back in 2013 and the figure they arrived at for merchandise was $67,500,000 – which converts to about £44,500,000.
Obviously there is NO SUCH THING as a gay member of One Direction, so we’ll have to use our imaginations here, but splitting that total between the five palpably heterosexual members of One Direction gives us £8.9 million per bandmate.
The 1% fan figure really starts to look a bit pathetic here because if only 1% of this merchandise is sold on account of hormonal impulses, then that would mean 99% of it is sold for its inherent worth or artistic merit – and that would be fucking insane. But, to remain consistent, let’s pretend that that’s the case. That’s £89,000 raised, per bandmate, purely in appealing to the pubertally obsessed.
As with record sales and ticket receipts, there’s all sorts of manufacturing costs and distribution costs and image licensing costs involved with merchandise which will nibble away a huge, huge chunk of that total figure – so, again, the individual bandmate won’t see anything like that much.
But, actually, it might be more useful for us to work this all out in gross figures for one very critical reason…
The Real Cost Of Coming Out
The reason that gross figures are more interesting to use is because they show how much money has been spent by the fans in total. The gross is the full amount of revenue generated, before anyone gets their hands on their slice of the profit – be it the taxman, the record label, the distribution companies, the concert promoters, the tour bus driver, or the bandmates themselves.
And it’s in these gross figures that we start to see why so many of these artists say things like this when they finally give their coming out interviews:
“When you’re a young band trying to be successful, there’s a lot of pressure on you to be clean-cut and accessible to your female fans.” – Duncan James (2009)
“Many people told me: ‘Ricky, it’s not important’, ‘it’s not worth it’, ‘all the years you’ve worked and everything you’ve built will collapse’, ‘many people in the world are not ready to accept your truth, your reality, your nature’. Because all this advice came from people who I love dearly, I decided to move on with my life not sharing with the world my entire truth.” – Ricky Martin (2010)
“I’d been out to a lot of people since 19. I wish to God it had happened then. I don’t think I would have the same career – my ego might not have been satisfied in some areas – but I think I would have been a happier man… My gay life didn’t get easier when I came out. Quite the opposite happened, really. The press seemed to take some delight that I previously had a ‘straight audience,’ and set about trying to destroy that.” – George Michael (2007)
“Times have changed so much. It’s great that there can be openly gay members in bands, but I do know there are some pop stars hiding their sexuality in some bands today, for fear that their fan base will reject them.” – Ian ‘H’ Watkins (2013)
There is a whole host of people making money off the back of these boys; swathes of employees surrounding all of these bands. Each and every one of them – whether they know it or not – is taking a cut of a profit generated by lovestruck young girls and their fruitless fixations so the pressures exerted by this hoard aren’t slight. Using our very unscientific (but surely understated) calculations, we see that these figures run into the millions very, very quickly.
There is a knee-jerk temptation when faced with the cold, hard numbers to decry this all as unethical – fraudulent, even – but the truth of it is, like most things in life, a whole lot more complicated.
To accuse every – or even any – member of staff at the CD pressing plant of somehow being complicit in this; to accuse every T-shirt vendor in every stadium of profiteering from the repression of somebody’s true sexual identity is obviously nonsense. Though they may skim a tiny bit of cream off the top of it all, their individual involvement is so tangential that it is useless to take this up with them.
It is equally useless to take it up with the pop star in question, as it is very rarely the case that the closeted singer is the one choosing to stay schtum about his sexuality.
So who is responsible? The person who wields the greatest influence in any band – and may therefore be expected to bear the greatest responsibility – is the manager, but even they won’t necessarily have it in their power to decide exactly how a boy band is presented to the public.
Most of the time these bands are formed when the individual members are tremendously young. They’ll be 16, 17 – rarely older – and most of them will not have come from big, cosmopolitan cites. Many of them will have grown up in places and at times where they might not have felt as supported or encouraged or comfortable in the way we often imagine they must have been when we see the finished, multi-million pound product. And some of them at 16 or 17 won’t properly have a clue about who or what they’re going to be into at 22 or 23, so it’s equally impossible for anyone dealing with the band at that age to work it all out either.
Although it was easy to scoff when Louis Walsh feigned ignorance about both Stephen Gately and Mark Feehily’s true sexualities, really, it isn’t quite as ridiculous as it seems. All a manager wants when they start looking for boy band recruits is a good-looking lad who can move, hold a tune and be easily groomed to become what is often termed in the industry as an “Entry Level Lust Object”.
The fact of the matter is that the reality of anyone’s sexuality isn’t actually that important to the manager. All of the artists will have a fictional (or fabricated) love life – gay or straight – and all of their relationships will micromanaged in order to help maintain a little bit of mystery.
So if it isn’t the manager, it isn’t the star and it isn’t the record label, what is the real driving factor behind all of this? The irrepressible and uncontrollable spirit of the teenage pop fan.
The hopeless, futile crush that exists between pop fan and pop star transcends such things as age, gender, sexual orientation and general feasibility. There’s nothing anyone can do to stop a fourteen year old holding a flame for their favourite singer – no matter who they are, no matter how ill-judged. It is a juggernaut force, one that is impossible to contain or quantify.
If pop fans want to channel their frustrated carnal desires through pop paraphernalia, spending their money on music and merchandise even though they are inadvertently fuelling a market which encourages musicians to suppress their sexual identity, then that is what they’ll do – and there’s not a damn thing anyone can do to stop them.
