Networks of global pop influence

In January 2023, Shakira and Pique split up. Whatever the story, the intricacies of this rupture exploded across the Spanish speaking social media platforms and beyond, particularly when the singer published a song via YouTube the night of January 11th that "broke" the platform record (BBC, 2023; TheGuardian, 2023; or Forbes, 2023 among many others). The international and transatlantic impact of the YouTube release shows a music industry orchestrating a world hit of a scale without precedents. The original video reached 63 million views in 24 hours; and at the time of writing 731 million views. The impact of the video release also extended through more than 7 million tweets during that week.

Beyond debates on feminism, or telenovela drama, a powerful network of influencers and established media outlets joined and spinned further a conversation that incorporated, later, social media managers of brands such as Renault (for the reference to Twingo) and Casio (also in reference to Pique's watch collection). This interpretive network of interactions and debates shapes a labor chain of an event staged to extend around the Spanish speaking world across the platforms. The collaborative and informal labor-intense activity is not linear or egalitarian; instead it looks highly pyramidal and seems very profitable for some of the involved (particularly the two splitting protagonists).

This talk dives into the chain of informal labor action through the analysis of the activity on Twitter. The exploration of the network allows to identify, trace, and visualise the role of influencers at promoting the song and the artist. Allowing for a balanced analysis that combines interpretive and computational tools to understand the network shape of influencers playing the algorithm logics of social media, and forming a chain of cultural production of unaccounted for labour intense activity. The analysis is a good example of networked and distributed forms of storytelling, that not only helps understand the role of social media platforms at shaping collective interest and environments of public debate; but also opens the space for the development of a relevant toolkit that helps processing and studying the complexity of an apparently spontaneous social -fandom and community driven- activity into a traceable and possibly planned process of global consequence.       

The analysis of this case connects with an ongoing research program on Influencers, celebrities, and platformisation that uses computational and network methods to study the processes of interactions and the ways the creative industries have adapted to maintain the ownership of the creative circuits, and how they do it by activating a pyramidal structure of YouTubers and Influencers that build further on the relevance and profit of those at the top. On this occasion, the case helps to recenter and identify the features of the social media networks and actors intervening in the Latin American and Spanish speaking music industries.

Forbes (2023, January 16th) Colombian Pop Star Shakira Proves She is 'Out of your league' as video breaks YouTube record. Available online: https://www.forbes.com/sites/petersuciu/2023/01/16/colombian-pop-star-shakira-proves-she-is-out-of-your-league-as-video-breaks-youtube-record/?sh=27f5efe5c763