I feel like this is the point that gets missed. For these people that are famous for a skill or craft, Cameo turns them into an Organ Grinder Monkey. Obviously if the celeb is doing it, nobody is forcing them, but the whole thing just feels so cheap and degrading.
Who ever would have thought you'd say "I'll pay you $500 to wish me a happy birthday"
Why do you consider this any more degrading than any other form of patronage? Why is paying a musician to wish someone happy birthday somehow more shameful than demanding they sing and dance for me when I show up to their concert? In both cases, the artist gets the funds to keep making their art and the audience gets to continue enjoying that art.
There are a lot of concerts that are demeaning to the artist too. I am reminded of this clip from a documentary on Katy Perry[1]. Her marriage was falling apart while she was on tour until eventually her husband asked for a divorce over a text message. She was left in tears backstage and had to force herself into a dress with pinwheels on her breasts and fake a smile for the thousands of tweens and teenagers in the audience. I have also been to a concert in which a band felt compelled to play their biggest hit to both open and close a show because that 3 minute song was the only reason a majority of the audience came to the show. I can't imagine either of those was a great situation for the artists.
Meanwhile Cameos can be incredibly meaningful for the people who receive them. They provide an intimate human connection to people they might otherwise have no chance of ever seeing in person. They also give the person fulfilling the Cameo complete control. They can be filled wherever or on whatever schedule they want. I would bet a lot of entertainers on Cameo are perfectly happy with the setup.
I don't think it is right to assume a feeling of morally superiority over the people who participate on either side of this service.
Is it? So any two people speaking directly and exclusively to each other are 'intimate'?
I'm with the others in that Cameo seems like a fine platform for debasing and exploiting b-listers and past-their-primes. It's the 2020 version of game show or infomercial cameos.
There will always be a market's worth of people with enough vanity to think that the kind of service Cameo provides is morally sound. They are probably the same folks that keep the National Enquirer and Daily Mail afloat.
Let's not kid ourselves with fancy imagery about how good it makes someone feel or how beautiful it is that it satiates someone's desires. "I'm just building what people want" is the classic amoralist's cop-out.
Definition 2 of intimate: of a very personal or private nature.[1]
These video messages or both personal and private therefore they are intimate.
I don't know why disinterest in using this service is almost always coupled with condescension to the people who do use it. It isn't doing any harm to anyone. There are no negative externalities. Just let the people who are interested in the service have their fun.
I won't go so far as the other detractors and say that it's necessarily a debasement of a celebrity to get paid to record a scripted message. It's actually kind of a cool service, especially if there's a price point or agent contacts for commercial messages. In that regard it's not so different from ordering an inscription on a custom artisanal kitchen accessory.
But what I find sad is the commentary it makes on the state of humanity's collective emotional development if commercial celebrity endorsements and falsely personal birthday messages have so much more sway over our hearts than messages from people who are actually in our lives. Separating fiction from reality is one of the early lessons we teach children. It's not the mere existence of this service that is the problem, it's that it belies a deeper issue with culture in general.
> But what I find sad is the commentary it makes on the state of humanity's collective emotional development if commercial celebrity endorsements and falsely personal birthday messages have so much more sway over our hearts than messages from people who are actually in our lives.
This is what you're failing to understand. The celebrity messages don't have more sway over our hearts than messages from people who are actually in our lives. You don't pay for messages from people who are in your life because you already get a lot of contact with them for free.
But if you think paying $50 for a message from a celebrity is too much, that it overvalues celebrities relative to people who you actually have a meaningful connection with... just remember that people pay tens of thousands of dollars for (scam!) messages from people who were once important to them personally, and are now dead. The demonstrated value of the personal relationship is near-infinitely large compared to the celebrity pseudo-relationship.
If your son likes basketball, and you commission a painting of him playing against Lebron James, that lets him imagine himself being a part of that world. If you commission a birthday message to him from Lebron James... that lets him imagine himself being a part of that world. What's the difference?
>But what I find sad is the commentary it makes on the state of humanity's collective emotional development if commercial celebrity endorsements and falsely personal birthday messages have so much more sway over our hearts than messages from people who are actually in our lives. //
Yes, this. What we laud and prioritise often seems so hollow.
I think there's an assumption being made here about how snobbish or desperate artists are.
Many artists and celebrities actually get a great deal of joy and fulfillment out of making individual people feel special through a personalized experience. Realistically they just cannot do it for everyone. Using a service like this, they now can do it and you can compensate them for their time, so everyone wins.
If an artist feel like they're being disrespected or having to compromise on their artistry, they can always just reject the request, simple as that.
I definitely appreciate your sentiment, and that wasn't my intention with the initial comment, and, of course, nobody is ever forcing an artist to join Cameo.
I have no problem with an artist wanting to make a fan feel good. I do have a problem with a society that promotes celebrity for celebrity sake, and I believe as an extension of that, the true craft/gift of the artist/performer/etc is not what is being appreciated.
I suspect that we will arrive at a point where the value drops to near $0 when anyone can just go and guy a greeting/message from a celebrity.
The problem is, no one will pay $500 to "hang out and enjoy you play."
I pay for several musicians on Patreon and even $5/month seems excessive to me, all the while I think this is just not a living for the musician when I see their subscriber count. And I'm probably one of the few that pays for this. It's a bad model even though I wish it wasn't.
But, there are a few people who will pay $500 to that musician for a personalized message.
The math is better with the latter. You just need a few people to do that to make a living. There is just not a way, despite Kevin Kelly's great article about 1000 fans, to make it work.
I bet most artists would argue that money in their bank account is worth much more than "respecting agency." Musicians have to be feeling a lot of pain right now with live venues shuttered indefinitely.
So I'm actually in a place much like you where I contribute $5 or so to a few different artists or personalities who I engage with.
However, I feel it's very worthwhile for me:
+ Most of them have some kind of discord or community where you can interact both with them and other fans, and contributing gets you special status or a special channel
+ Usually you get a few extra things that don't get released to other people, whether it's sitting in on a practice session or some media that didn't make the final cut
Admittedly, I am still ultimately paying for some kind of attention, though hopefully it's agency respecting attention and not treating an artist like a vending machine.
And yeah a bottom line matters, everyone has to eat to survive and pay their bills, but as long as you can do that most people will quickly choose a happier life over a more profitable one. Sure, you can do worse work and make more money (or the same money faster) but I don't think that's the tradeoff the majority want to make.
One of the personalities I contribute to has changed their thing a few times. They abandoned ASMR and switched to just videogame streaming, and they were pretty honest that it was going to be a part time thing because it wasn't paying the bills fully. Yet, they still kept their community, they still have the same fan base. and at this rate I've probably followed them for 3 or 4 years. They've gained the freedom to do the things they find interesting, instead of the things that make the community happy.
But that's kinda a base thing to build a cultured society around. Can't we do better than that yet, what progress has humanity made?
Agency is what artists need to perform their cultural function in society. Sure there are demands for music and images that don't care for the cultural role of art; but most artists seem to want at least some agency, though the need to do bread-and-butter work (baseline earnings) is something that hits early in any artists career.
All of these celebrities regularly take appearance fees to show up at nightclubs, bar mitzvahs, birthday parties, etc. It's extremely common. You don't hear about most of them because they're private events.
Orrrrrr they realize it's just another way to entertain people and make them happy. If they didn't want to entertain, they probably wouldn't have chosen that career in the first place, now there are "micro-gigs" they can take too to get an extra level of personal-ness.
I think it is a good service and might actually feel good for the celebrity even outside of the money aspect. I used it to have a minor celebrity from my wife's favorite show wish her a happy birthday. She loved it. I would be interested to hear how a celebrity feels about doing that kind of stuff but I would think it feels good to make someone's day better.
Many celebrities have an "appearance fee" meaning they'll meet for a certain number of hours for whatever you pay for (within reason). So, for example, if you're rich enough you could get in touch with their agent and book your favourite celebrity for a lunch or dinner. This just takes it to a scale that wouldn't be possible before.
They choose to be on Cameo to do it. So who cares? They make it worth their time. LeBron might do it for say $50,000 and say that all of it goes to charity. That sounds good to me.
> but the whole thing just feels so cheap and degrading
What do you propose as an alternative?
These are mostly people who aren't getting work anymore. What dignified career do you imagine for them, when there are a million younger, cheaper entertainers to take their place?
It would be great if they all had college degrees and the ability to be hired in a stable white-collar job, but that's rarely an option after a life in entertainment.
B and C list celebs have been doing autograph signings and meet and greet for decades. Performers travel to cities in the middle of nowhere and stay there for hours before shuttling off to another location. I think it is a bit silly to single out quick video messages, that they sign up for and can set their own price for, as debasement.
