Days later, Spears’s psychiatrist switched out her medication for a lithium prescription, advising that she wasn’t cooperating and was refusing to take her medication. The “Domination” residency, which had been announced to great fanfare months earlier, was quickly canceled, and Spears was once again involuntarily admitted to a psychiatric facility by handlers who—according to a paralegal who spoke to the podcast Britney’s Gram—theorized that the media buzz would boost ticket sales when she returned to the stage.
A half dozen streaming documentaries and Lord knows how many true-crime podcasts would ultimately chronicle the courtroom drama through which Spears emancipated herself from her indentured servitude. And yet three years after Spears detailed how she was imprisoned in her own home by a battalion of leeches who institutionalized her (at her own expense) in retaliation for attempting to tweak her own choreography, the pop music industry remains more thankless and constricting than ever.
Just as summer was beginning, both Jennifer Lopez and the Black Keys were forced to cancel tours in which they had invested considerable sums of their own cash, due to lukewarm demand for tickets that had been priced too aggressively. The prolific hit machine Bebe Rexha unleashed a torrent of social media posts about how “hopeless” she felt working in an industry she claimed had repeatedly conspired to “undermine” her. And Spotify, as if on cue, announced it was tweaking its “mechanical royalties” compensation formula; songwriters could expect to receive $150 million less in 2025 than they had in 2024. The Guardian convinced 12 musical acts, including two with recent album releases that had charted in the top ten, to share their balance sheets from their most recent concert tours. Just one had turned a profit, of only about $7,000 for 29 performances.
These problems are more connected than they might seem, because power and resources in the music industry are so unbelievably concentrated. Since the demise of recorded music sales in the early 2000s, pop music in America has increasingly become a single-payer system, in which virtually every working musician relies for the majority of his or her earnings on a concert promotions cabal, anchored by Live Nation/Ticketmaster and its former CEO, the diminutive mogul Irving Azoff. Collectively, they own or control nearly 500 of the nation’s most important concert venues, sell more than 80 percent of the nation’s concert tickets, and perversely also solely or jointly manage the careers, brands, and business affairs of hundreds of artists, from U2 and Dua Lipa to Drake and The Weeknd.
Readers of the Prospect are well aware that the Biden Justice Department brought a case against Live Nation in May, seeking to unwind the 2009 Azoff-brokered deal that merged it with Ticketmaster. The lawsuit has much to say about Azoff, arguing that his new venue management company Oak View Group operates as a “pimp” for Live Nation. But the action was inspired in part by the intergalactic backlash after ticket-buying algorithms infested a supposedly fan-only presale of Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour in November 2022 and drove prices up a thousand percent and more.
As flashpoints in protracted struggles against tyranny go, the Eras-trophe left something to be desired. Media coverage tended to focus on the plight of spoiled 13-year-old daughters of affluent white women—many of whom ultimately solved the problem by purchasing more accessibly priced tickets in Dublin or Vienna and mentally reclassifying the expense as an educational enterprise—which in turn enabled Live Nation and its legions of surrogates to spend the ensuing year and a half proposing legislation to crack down on ticket-hoarding bots. A far more illustrative media event for the purpose of illustrating the dangers of unchecked concert monopolies was probably the 2021 mass casualty event at Travis Scott’s Astroworld concert, which numerous settled lawsuits alleged was the predictable result of combining Scott’s feral live persona with Live Nation’s relentless cost-cutting and outsourcing.
But to truly grasp the terrifying insidiousness of the concert cartel’s control over the music industry and the artists who are its lifeblood—and why even a successful antitrust case may not change much of anything—one must peruse the work of the leading scholar of the #FreeBritney movement, namely a Northern Virginia anti-monopoly activist named Melanie Carlson, whose deeply researched Substack explores the corporate and para-political relationships behind celebrity drama.
A licensed clinical social worker who is currently working on a doctoral dissertation about the institutional failures of domestic violence shelters, Carlson was originally drawn to #FreeBritney out of a combination of pandemic boredom and domestic abuse expertise. But upon diving into the court documents, she quickly realized that there was nothing “domestic” about Britney’s house arrest.
For starters, it was abundantly clear from business records, court filings, and Britney’s public appearances that a Nashville-based bookkeeper-turned-talent management specialist named Louise Taylor—dubbed #Loucifer by the movement—had played the most conspicuous role in orchestrating the conservatorship. But Loucifer herself was just one in a long list of seemingly interchangeable music managers turned mini-moguls (Scooter Braun, Sal Slaiby) who appeared to trade the same blue-chip clients every few years. And in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Taylor named Irving Azoff and current Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino as her biggest mentors. (...)
The conservatorship was further codified by Caesars, the gaming conglomerate that hosted Spears’s “Piece of Me” residency in its Planet Hollywood casino and reportedly included a clause in its contract with the singer allowing it to cancel the residency if the conservatorship ended. (...)
Today, Live Nation manages the careers of some 2,000 artists through a dizzying collection of subsidiary management firms co-founded by such legendary managers as Guy Oseary, Scooter Braun, Jack Rovner, and the aforementioned Larry Rudolph, who discovered Spears when she was just 13 years old.
Unlike many of her contemporaries, Spears had plenty of revenue streams other than concert tours to tap into. (She is, for example, estimated to have sold $1.5 billion in licensed perfume alone during the period of her conservatorship, and she made a reported $15 million a season as a reality show judge.) But by the mid-2000s, the music industry was in a state of existential despair. Recorded music sales had plunged two-thirds from the peak they hit in 1999, the year “Baby One More Time” sold most of the 25 million copies it moved. Britney’s critically lauded Blackout album, which had been released early in 2007 after getting leaked to the blogger Perez Hilton, sold just 2.5 million copies. “After her divorce, all her rehab expenses and her constant nights on the town at pricey L.A. restaurants,” opined one Fox News gossip columnist in April 2007, “Spears had better get back to work. And just an album won’t cut it. She’s got to figure out a way to tour. It’s the only way left to make money in what was once known as the music business.”
In hindsight, the conservatorship appears to have turned Spears, who at that point was far more interested in hanging out with her children than performing night after night, into a touring machine. And it worked: Spears brought in nearly $400 million in ticket revenue between 2009 and 2017, all while the battalion of lawyers, business managers, financial advisers, and medical professionals on her payroll continued to insist she was unable to care for herself.
It was while recording Blackout that Britney Spears began to report she was being stalked by a “crazy lady” who had been FedExing her strange gifts, photos of herself with butterflies and letters in which she advised the superstar, using a creepily maternal tone, that she was “possessed” and needed to exorcise her “demon spirits.” As Spears wrote in an email to her then-lawyer Gary Stiffelman, “We told her a million times to leave me alone and now she is saying she is going to visit my drunk fucking father in Kentwood [Louisiana].”
The crazy lady was Lou Taylor, who specialized in a certain kind of pseudo-faith-based celebrity crisis management. Unbeknownst to Spears, Taylor had been working behind the scenes for at least four years to insinuate herself into the family business: managing little sister Jamie Lynn’s budding career as the star of the popular Nickelodeon show Zoey 101, “praying and fasting” with their estranged father Jamie, hiring a ghostwriter for the memoir Lynne Spears announced she was writing shortly after Jamie Lynn became pregnant at age 16 with the child of a boy she’d met at a church camp, even loaning Jamie Spears $40,000 shortly before his daughter was involuntarily hospitalized. Taylor exchanged emails with Jamie Spears’s lawyers, brainstorming about who would manage the conservatorship, even agreeing to postpone the request until a particular judge who was known to frown upon giving conservators the power to administer psychotropic drugs to their charges went on vacation.
#FreeBritney activists have spent years researching Taylor’s role in the conservatorship, attempting to assess her actions and quantify how much she extracted from the Britney Spears brand, a figure that has ranged from $18 million to $600 million. Taylor, for her part, told The New York Times that she “did nothing wrong” in the Spears case; the Prospect sought comment from her but did not receive a response.
But the most alarming thing about Taylor and the rest of “Team Con,” which is short for conservatorship in the #FreeBritney world, is the way their careers link some of the tawdriest episodes of institutionalized abuse to the uppermost echelons of corporate America. Just two years after Britney was conserved, Lindsay Lohan’s parents told X17 Online that Taylor had approached them to manage a conservatorship for the former child actress. Around the same time, Kurt Cobain’s widow Courtney Love revealed in social media posts that Taylor had attempted to impose a “muted strain of a conservatorship” on her as part of an elaborate plot—masterminded, Love claimed, by Azoff and Lester Knispel—to secure control over Cobain’s publishing rights, which she held.
For most of Taylor’s clients, a “spiritual” connection is one of the selling points: She and her pastor husband Rob have controlled many churches, to which most of her clients seem to tithe a large portion of their paychecks. (Jamie Spears contributed hundreds of thousands of the dollars he made as his daughter’s conservator to Rob Taylor’s Cavalry church.) The Kardashians and Biebers were reported to be tithing 10 percent of their income to a megachurch called Churchome on whose board Taylor served; rumors have since swirled that P. Diddy, now hit with nine separate lawsuits for alleged sex trafficking, tithed large portions of his income to churches Taylor controlled. Diddy has denied all of the allegations. (...)
Unlike many of her contemporaries, Spears had plenty of revenue streams other than concert tours to tap into. (She is, for example, estimated to have sold $1.5 billion in licensed perfume alone during the period of her conservatorship, and she made a reported $15 million a season as a reality show judge.) But by the mid-2000s, the music industry was in a state of existential despair. Recorded music sales had plunged two-thirds from the peak they hit in 1999, the year “Baby One More Time” sold most of the 25 million copies it moved. Britney’s critically lauded Blackout album, which had been released early in 2007 after getting leaked to the blogger Perez Hilton, sold just 2.5 million copies. “After her divorce, all her rehab expenses and her constant nights on the town at pricey L.A. restaurants,” opined one Fox News gossip columnist in April 2007, “Spears had better get back to work. And just an album won’t cut it. She’s got to figure out a way to tour. It’s the only way left to make money in what was once known as the music business.”
In hindsight, the conservatorship appears to have turned Spears, who at that point was far more interested in hanging out with her children than performing night after night, into a touring machine. And it worked: Spears brought in nearly $400 million in ticket revenue between 2009 and 2017, all while the battalion of lawyers, business managers, financial advisers, and medical professionals on her payroll continued to insist she was unable to care for herself.
It was while recording Blackout that Britney Spears began to report she was being stalked by a “crazy lady” who had been FedExing her strange gifts, photos of herself with butterflies and letters in which she advised the superstar, using a creepily maternal tone, that she was “possessed” and needed to exorcise her “demon spirits.” As Spears wrote in an email to her then-lawyer Gary Stiffelman, “We told her a million times to leave me alone and now she is saying she is going to visit my drunk fucking father in Kentwood [Louisiana].”
The crazy lady was Lou Taylor, who specialized in a certain kind of pseudo-faith-based celebrity crisis management. Unbeknownst to Spears, Taylor had been working behind the scenes for at least four years to insinuate herself into the family business: managing little sister Jamie Lynn’s budding career as the star of the popular Nickelodeon show Zoey 101, “praying and fasting” with their estranged father Jamie, hiring a ghostwriter for the memoir Lynne Spears announced she was writing shortly after Jamie Lynn became pregnant at age 16 with the child of a boy she’d met at a church camp, even loaning Jamie Spears $40,000 shortly before his daughter was involuntarily hospitalized. Taylor exchanged emails with Jamie Spears’s lawyers, brainstorming about who would manage the conservatorship, even agreeing to postpone the request until a particular judge who was known to frown upon giving conservators the power to administer psychotropic drugs to their charges went on vacation.
#FreeBritney activists have spent years researching Taylor’s role in the conservatorship, attempting to assess her actions and quantify how much she extracted from the Britney Spears brand, a figure that has ranged from $18 million to $600 million. Taylor, for her part, told The New York Times that she “did nothing wrong” in the Spears case; the Prospect sought comment from her but did not receive a response.
But the most alarming thing about Taylor and the rest of “Team Con,” which is short for conservatorship in the #FreeBritney world, is the way their careers link some of the tawdriest episodes of institutionalized abuse to the uppermost echelons of corporate America. Just two years after Britney was conserved, Lindsay Lohan’s parents told X17 Online that Taylor had approached them to manage a conservatorship for the former child actress. Around the same time, Kurt Cobain’s widow Courtney Love revealed in social media posts that Taylor had attempted to impose a “muted strain of a conservatorship” on her as part of an elaborate plot—masterminded, Love claimed, by Azoff and Lester Knispel—to secure control over Cobain’s publishing rights, which she held.
For most of Taylor’s clients, a “spiritual” connection is one of the selling points: She and her pastor husband Rob have controlled many churches, to which most of her clients seem to tithe a large portion of their paychecks. (Jamie Spears contributed hundreds of thousands of the dollars he made as his daughter’s conservator to Rob Taylor’s Cavalry church.) The Kardashians and Biebers were reported to be tithing 10 percent of their income to a megachurch called Churchome on whose board Taylor served; rumors have since swirled that P. Diddy, now hit with nine separate lawsuits for alleged sex trafficking, tithed large portions of his income to churches Taylor controlled. Diddy has denied all of the allegations. (...)
Last year, Britney Spears published a best-selling memoir, The Woman in Me, about her life in the gilded gulag of her conservatorship. The details were somehow even more dystopian and heartbreaking than all the documentaries and magazine narratives had conveyed. Spears vividly described the process of repeatedly making peace with the arrangement so she could spend time with her sons, only to have the tiny pleasures she was still allowed—french fries and desserts, over-the-counter energy supplements, vacations with her children—taken away for tiny perceived infractions. And she wrote with disarming wistfulness about 2007, the year of the head shaving and serial meltdowns before she turned into a “robot doll,” when she was still allowed to sleep in and drink shots with Paris Hilton when she wanted.
She describes rediscovering her love for performing over the course of a three-year “Piece of Me” residency in Las Vegas, only to be driven insane by her handlers’ refusal to let her make even minor tweaks to the performance. She sang the same 22 songs in the same order 248 times. “It was so lazy it was actually odd,” Spears wrote. “I worried what my fans would think of me. But as always the answer was no. Because if I actually took control of my show, it could awaken people to the fact that I might not need my dad as a conservator. I feel like he secretly liked me feeling ‘less than.’ It gave him power.”
Spears’s specific predicament was so exotic that it’s easy to forget her imprisonment was just a more intense version of the control that middlemen like Lou Taylor and Live Nation exert over all of their “product offerings,” no matter how famous and uniquely beloved. (...)
At this point, they all know the sordid backstory of the original Las Vegas residency, wherein Elvis Presley’s personal Loucifer, his longtime manager “Colonel” Tom Parker, leashed the King to the exhausting seven-year, 837-performance contract at the International Hotel that would arguably cause his early death, all to sustain the Colonel’s own vicious gambling addiction. (The International would send a roulette wheel to Colonel Parker’s room so he could gamble away.)
When Britney’s “Piece of Me” residency debuted shortly after her 32nd birthday in 2013, it was immediately hailed as a transformative event in the annals of the “Las Vegas musical landscape,” historically the realm of past-their-prime easy-listening talents. Britney’s engineered Sin City enslavement may seem in the modern day far more cynical than the King’s, because she was a young mom of two little boys. But Elvis had a one-year-old at home when his Vegas residency began, and he was just two years older than Britney at 34. The history of the music industry has been one of artist exploitation, even as the names of the exploiters have changed.
by Maureen Tkazic, The American Prospect | Read more:
Image: James Nielsen/AP
[ed. I don't pay much attention to celebrities so didn't realize how venal her conservatorship actually was, and the whole industry appears similarly infected. What a surprise. See also: The New Pornographers (Tik Tok):]
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"The influencers, yes, with their perfect makeup and strategic camera angles and professional lighting, all to make their lives seem enviable while narrating their days in a strange monotone. They show off massive homes with the house numbers in the font of gentrification. They travel around the world, mostly in first or business class, discussing their enjoyment of champagne and caviar and perfectly cooked fish and sumptuous desserts. They review hotels and lie out on beautiful beaches overlooking crystalline waters. They adventure and ride camels and visit rainforests. The world, for these TikTokkers, is an abundant oyster, from which they pluck pearls of audience engagement. There is a young woman, Nara Smith, who is a model and influencer married to a model and influencer named Lucky Blue Smith. They are zygotes, relatively speaking, and already have four children (one from Lucky’s previous marriage). Though they rarely say it, they are Mormon (and there are a lot of similar influencers on TikTok). I am chagrined to know this, and yet. … Most days, Nara makes videos, speaking in that ubiquitous monotone people on the platform use, as she makes the most ludicrous things from scratch. She makes her own marshmallows and Turkish pizza and granola and mozzarella cheese. She can make Snickers bars from scratch and ice cream and also chewing gum. Clearly, she is doing this, in part, to mess with her very large audience, who often express bewilderment, admiration, and/or disdain as she appears in her perfectly appointed kitchen and starts cooking while wearing a lacy evening gown or other outfit that is not conducive to cooking. She is selling an enviable lifestyle — one where she is unencumbered by how the dishes are washed or who is tending to the children while she makes her videos, one where the particulars of her financial situation are inscrutable as she surrounds herself with the trappings of conspicuous consumption. Don’t get me started on Ballerina Farm, but it’s a whole thing.
Families with 10 or more children, often evangelical, who own innumerable coordinated outfits, and think quite highly of themselves even though they are never doing much of anything on camera. Parents sharing a day in the life, sometimes with medically complex children. Throuples sharing a day in the life. Pet owners sharing a day in the life. People getting ready to go out for a night on the town or to a birthday party or work. Couples sharing, in precise detail, what they’re wearing from underwear to the scent of the day. Makeup artists offering tutorials or showing off their skills. People sharing what they eat every day or doing meal prep for the week. Aestheticians and dermatologists cleaning pores and pulling viscera from body cavities. Hairdressers and barbers performing their services on a range of people from weekly clients to people who haven’t washed their hair in months or years and need a little care and tenderness to undo the damage. Doctors and nurses offering medical advice, or dancing or sharing what a shift is like or making fun of annoying patients, which, I’ll admit, doesn’t always inspire a lot of confidence in the medical establishment. (...)
There are so many “viral” dances. So many. These dances are usually created by Black creators and end up as memes that Kansas grandmothers and everyone else try to mimic to great or not so great effect. And there are the many, many niche communities. So many. Women who pack lunch for their husbands and detail everything, including the silverware and napkins. The quantity of food these men take to work is staggering, in case you were wondering. Housewives with a yen for organization and clear plastic storage goods. As in, you can watch videos of people bringing groceries home, emptying their refrigerators, cleaning them, and refilling their refrigerators, with everything neatly organized. People will remove things from one container only to place them in another, with a neatly printed label. It’s hypnotic but also deeply distressing when you start to think about the environmental impact.
TikTok is creative and sprawling and often strange and anarchic, which mirrors the internet more broadly. There are few rules; the platform takes all comers. Chaos is inevitable. You can find absolutely anything; it’s incredible to witness how many different ways there are to be, how creative (or uncreative) people are, how we crave attention, hoping that if we make the perfect video, we might be catapulted to some version of fame. It is also … haunting, how so many of us yearn to be seen, to be understood."
