Music Stars Embrace "The Intimacy Economy" to Connect with Fans

The Intimacy Economy: Why Music Stars Are Going Small

October 2, 2026 By Diana Umana

MBW Views is a series of op-eds from eminent music industry people… with something to say.

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The following MBW op/ed comes from MBW  columnist Diana ‘ladidai’ Umana (pictured inset below), a writer who has spent recent years interviewing artists in and around underground culture.

Below, Umana argues that ‘going small’ is a structural shift in today’s music business that some of the biggest artists have already caught on to…

On June 29 of this year, I stood in an underground jazz venue at the Aman Hotel in New York with roughly 150 other people, watching Jack Harlow perform.

No traditionally expected ticket link, IG post, press push, or other form of online promotional effort accompanied it. The show was announced solely through his broadcast channel, sent directly to fans who had opted in. If you knew, you knew, and if you didn’t, no algorithm was going to tell you.

It was one of the most effective pieces of music marketing I witnessed all year, and it was designed to reach almost no one.

On July 13 (just ahead of the release of her eighth album, Music, Fashion, Film ) Charli XCX gave that instinct a name. In a tweet that has pulled north of five million views, she predicted that “anti marketing” is about to become a thing: still marketing, she clarified, but intimate, personal, one-on-one, “less about the projection of scale.”

The internet split into two camps. One called her a visionary. The other pointed out that anti-marketing is just marketing, as old as Wu-Tang pressing a single copy of an album.

Both camps are missing the point. Because it’s not about semantics, nor is it strictly financial. The most marketing-literate pop star of her generation just told the industry that the projection of scale (the thing label marketing departments are built to produce) has stopped converting.

With her album’s first-week numbers now on the board, the question worth asking isn’t whether she aptly labeled this phenomenon. It’s what happens to the way we look at rollouts (read: marketing budgets) if she’s right about the mechanics.

The architect of minimalist maximalism wants out

Start with the irony, because the irony is the argument. This prediction comes from the person who ran the most minimalist maximalist (yes, you read that right) album campaign of the decade.

Brat was a masterclass in the seemingly flippant projection of scale: #8ACE00 that colonized every surface it touched, a Brooklyn wall repainted all summer, a rollout so thorough it ended up influencing one of the most crucial presidential election cycles in recent memory. “I was thinking about marketing before I was making the music,” the 2024 Hitmaker of the Year told Variety . So when that artist announces the death of marketing as we know it, it’s important to listen.

This is a postmortem from the person who ran the experiment at full scale, experienced its effectiveness as the world witnessed and applauded, then spun it all on its head as almost a rebellion against mainstream success.

How the stars embrace “anti-marketing”

At the top of the industry, Charli’s prediction already happened. Dua Lipa built a newsletter, a direct line with no algorithm in between. Drake , Kendrick Lamar , and J. Cole have all operated finsta-style pages, posts that feel intercepted rather than broadcast.

Charli runs her own b.sides Instagram account – roughly 415,000 followers compared to her main one’s 9.2 million.

Doja Cat hosted 15 fans at an undisclosed West Hollywood address, phones prohibited, in partnership with Airbnb . Ice Spice streamed on Twitch while traveling abroad, where a replay is nothing like dropping Ws in the chat live. Justin Bieber ’s SKYLRK pop-ups landed in New York this summer, a larger-than-life artist engineering rooms built to human scale. And, of course, Harlow’s jazz room.

None of them needed to; the projection-of-scale apparatus is on retainer. They are choosing smaller on purpose, and that pattern is the strongest evidence Charli is describing something that other stars have already bet on.

Intimacy is the backbone of the music industry

I have already argued in these pages that Gen Z’s cultural gravity has decoupled from mainstream scale. Anti-marketing is that thesis arriving from the opposite direction: top down. Hip-hop’s underground and the DIY scenes never called intimacy a strategy; it was the budget: no spend means your rollout is a broadcast channel, a group chat, a room.

What Charli is naming is the moment the top starts choosing, as an aesthetic, what the bottom practiced as a constraint. Artists still mid-climb are already splitting the difference: Ayra Starr and Ravyn Lenae both marked major releases with signings at Vinyl + Thread , an independent record shop, rather than a Target sales floor. Then they served the machine anyway; Good Morning America for Ayra, Fallon for Ravyn. With mid-tier stars there’s a constant tension that they understand better than bigger stars making a return.

Are album sales proof of concept?

Before Music, Fashion, Film arrived on July 24, Charli previewed it “exclusively in independent cinemas,” per her own flyer: one-night listening events pairing the album with docu-style footage, at Metrograph in New York and The Castle Cinema in London, with a second wave the eve of release in cities from Oakland to Closter, New Jersey. That second wave went out through b.sides, to the 411,000 who’d earned the address.

Demand embarrassed supply. I joined the RSVP queue the moment the text alert hit, disappointingly missed the New York festivities, and then considered the drive to Closter. The scarcity became the story, which, in turn, is the mechanism.

On July 10 she played the 650-cap Music Hall of Williamsburg with Clairo , underscores , and Kim Petras , and shared what appeared to be her label’s list of marketing ideas. Her rejection of the boardroom’s gimmicks became the campaign itself.

Then the numbers came in, and they say much more than triumph or tumble. The album debuted at No. 3 on the Billboard 200 with 78,000 equivalent units per Luminate , edging Brat ’s 77,000 to become the biggest opening week of her career, and topped the UK chart. Roughly 57,000 of those units were pure sales, an armada of vinyl variants, CD editions, and signed copies that handed her a first No. 1 on Billboard’s Top Album Sales chart. Streaming contributed roughly 21,000.

> “The scarcity became the story, which, in turn, is the mechanism.”

Set that split against the hypothesis and it reads like a controlled experiment. The ambient audience, the one the projection of scale is built to reach, showed up politely: a strong Spotify opening that still ranked outside the year’s top five female-artist debuts, a handful of cuts on the US Spotify chart even as every track charted in the UK.

The faithful, the ones intimacy is built to reach, bought the album outright, many of them multiple times. Anti-marketing didn’t beat scale at its own game – it converted a different customer.

Honesty requires saying the campaign was never as small as the aesthetic implied. A Rolling Stone cover, a theatrical release of the album film, a Lollapalooza headline a week after release, an arena tour, a Spotify-sponsored Nashville show that the platform later served to listeners as a performance “for her top fans,” and those two dozen format variants, which are less anti-marketing than direct-to-superfan commerce with better lighting.

New York Magazine argued that for all her stated interest in anti-marketing, the promotion is very much about the marketing. The critique is fair, and it is also the finding: anti-marketing is not the absence of the machine. It is a redirection of where the machine points, away from renting mass attention and toward monetizing devotion.

> “Anti-marketing is not the absence of the machine. It is a redirection of where the machine points, away from renting mass attention and toward monetizing devotion.”

Critics embraced it. Parts of the Brat -era fanbase answered with flop discourse or quiet. And the most clarifying observation all week came from a Threads user: the album “requires active listening, rather than passive consumption.” That is the whole strategy in one sentence. Active listening is what you get from someone who bought the vinyl. Or at the very least, active consumption, which is what saved her.

What happens to the money?

If anti-marketing scales, what happens to label marketing spend? The modern marketing department for the biggest stars is supposed to be an apparatus for the projection of scale: Times Square billboards, TV appearances, editorial playlists, influencer seeding campaigns.

Charli’s first week suggests the spend doesn’t disappear, it migrates – primarily toward D2C, CRM, owned channels, and experiences, toward whoever can operate one-on-one at population scale. Her tour’s $25 “Angel Tickets,” a nontransferable lottery allocation inside an arena run, are the same migration applied to ticketing: scale infrastructure engineered to produce an intimate outcome.

When nearly three-quarters of your opening week is pure sales, the highest-leverage marketing employee is no longer the one buying billboards. It’s the one who converted a consumer into a devotee.

The harder question is who gets to play. Intimacy is only legible as a statement when you have scale to reject. When Charli plays Williamsburg, the smallness is the story; when a developing artist plays the same room, it’s just another day putting their reps in.

So either anti-marketing is a superstar luxury good, or it rewrites the developing-artist playbook too, because if devotion is what converts, the artist who never had scale was running the right strategy all along, and the label’s job becomes doubling down on small while optimizing for scale.

And then there’s the question no spreadsheet can hold. Is a “flop” even a flop if the project lets a superstar feel the way they did on the come-up, on their own terms, answerable to day ones instead of the masses? Charli landed at No. 3 behind a Morgan Wallen album in its 63rd chart week, a feat of scale she was not trying to win, and it is clear to me that she wouldn’t trade places.

Surviving celebrity

Music, Fashion, Film outsold Brat by 1,000 units, a margin so thin it’s less a victory than a confirmation, and that number does not exist without Brat laying the foundation.

Two years of Brat (that green!) ushered Charli back into the zeitgeist at a scale she’d never commanded (even in 2014). Music, Fashion, Film is the album that gets to spend that capital. You can’t retreat to intimacy if you haven’t first gone somewhere large enough to retreat from. Anti-marketing isn’t a strategy for getting big. It’s a strategy for surviving being big. The Spotify show, the Lollapalooza headline, the arena tour: that’s the machine doing what it has to do, because nobody remains a superstar catering only to niche experiences.

The independent cinemas, the $25 Angel Tickets, a finsta filling a 650-cap room: that’s the retreat, the pressure valve that keeps you from becoming a caricature of yourself while the machine runs. Charli didn’t invent any of this – she called a thing a thing, and naming a behavior is often the moment it becomes a budget line.

The artists who last will be the ones who learn to hold both at once, the scale and the small. Somewhere right now, another superstar is gearing up to share exclusive details in a private channel. If you know, you know.

This article originally appeared in the latest issue of MBW’s premium print publication, Music Business Worldwide Magazine, which is out now.

Music Business Worldwide Magazine is available as part of a MBW+ subscription – details through here.

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_Originally reported by [Music Business Worldwide](https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/the-intimacy-economy-why-music-stars-are-going-small/)._