Baby Baby Baby….. So Clueless!

No this isn’t a 45 year old husband and father of two writing a review of Justin Bieber and it certainly is not a slam on the wildly successful young man. I actually have very little opinion on “The Bieb” one way or the other but some of the press he has gotten lately does serve as an example of how modern media trends are slipping away from people who really should know better.

A snippet from my hometown Montreal Gazette illustrates this point as they ask the question “Has Justin Bieber bubble burst?”(sic). Aside from the obvious grammatical failings in that headline of a major English language newspaper, they really do miss the point. The question is posed based on the fact that Justin’s recent appearance on the cover of Vanity Fair has proven to be one of the worst selling editions of the magazine.

Unfortunately Bieber’s popularity, or alleged lack-there-of, can be about as accurately gauged in this manner as the results of a Tracy Morgan spread in Pride weekly. The Author does get some redemption by mentioning that “13-yearold girls can’t afford the $12.95″. Again you have to pretend that ‘yearold’ is a word but, more importantly, it’s not so much that the tween set “can’t” buy the magazine but more along the lines of “why would they?” You can read the whole bit right here (have they caught the typo’s by now?)

The point I am making is that Bieber’s demographic is on the cutting edge of modern communication. Anything of value that might be contained in that article has already been tweeted, Facebooked, YouTubed, or Google+’ed around the globe three times by the time it hit the newsstands. I would imagine that about the same amount of Bieber fans would have picked it up if it were free. Don’t question the power of the Bieb just because you don’t understand his language. Especially when his manner of communication is actually relevant and your print newspaper is poised to become the next Latin. Did I mention I read the on-line version of the paper as opposed to flying 5000 km to pick one up?

Just for fun I looked up who has had the most successful Vanity Fair Cover and that information was harder to find (funny how that works). The best indication I could find pointed to a 2008 cover featuring Madonna. Because Madonna has has made a career of staying relevant over an extended period of time, she is actually a pretty good example of how measuring popularity has shifted since the innovation of social media.

I was surprised to find that Madonna does not have a twitter account (a verified one anyway). JB on the other hand has just short of 10.9 Million followers (that is #2 overall to Lady GaGa). About 5.5 Million people “like” Madonna on Facebook compared to 32 Million for Justin. To be fair to Madonna, these medium were not available during the peak of her popularity but she remains extremely popular so it is pretty safe to stay that the gap in their social media metrics is due more to the habits of their respective demographics than their real popularity.

All of this brings us back to ask why so many news outlets making such a huge deal out of Bieber’s struggles to sell copies of Vanity Fair? A fact which is about as close to irrelevant as you can get in terms of measuring popularity in his era. Slow news day? Easy target? I wonder if it would be as big a story if he lost half a million twitter followers? in reality that would represent a much bigger blow to the Bieb but how much of the mainstream media would recognize that, let alone report it.