Timberlake to Gaga: Hollywood courts social media
(Reuters) - When you think of Bono or Lady Gaga, the term “Silicon Valley entrepreneur” hardly springs to mind. — For now, at least. The U2 frontman and pop sensation join Justin Timberlake and Ashton Kutcher among the growing ranks …
Context & Ripple Effects
The line between Hollywood and Silicon Valley was already thinning before this story: Justin Timberlake spent 2010 playing Sean Parker in David Fincher's The Social Network, while Bono used a New York Times year-end list to attack a decade of music file-sharing — criticism aimed at the very platforms he now joins as an entrepreneur.
What changed by mid-2011 is direction of travel: rather than merely commenting on social media, U2's frontman, Lady Gaga, Timberlake and Ashton Kutcher are all reported by Reuters to be actively courting ventures in it. Each arrives with measurable leverage — Kutcher held one of Twitter's ten largest followings as of March 2011, and Gaga alone accounted for an estimated quarter of Vevo's video traffic.
First-order effects
- Kutcher's roughly 6.4 million Twitter followers make him a distribution channel as much as an investor — any startup he backs gets instant audience reach that most seed-stage companies spend years buying.
- Gaga's fan infrastructure, demonstrated by her Manhattan subway-train billboard blitz for 'Born This Way' earlier in July 2011, turns her celebrity brand into marketing muscle that social media partners can rent.
Second-order effects
- Startups gain a reason to price celebrity participation into their fundraising: attention is the scarcest input in consumer social media, and stars like Timberlake supply it at terms traditional venture capital cannot match.
- Record labels and film studios face pressure to treat artists' social followings as balance-sheet assets, following Bono's shift from decrying digital disruption to building within it.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, celebrity equity stakes become a standard feature of consumer internet deal-making, blurring the boundary between entertainment capital and venture capital and making fame itself a form of startup currency.
The trend: Celebrities are moving from critics and portrayers of social media to its investors and operators, converting audience scale directly into startup leverage.