What would you do for $2 million? Would you sell out your values?
Apparently Lady Gaga would.
Lady Gaga is being paid $2 million by Doritos to make an appearance at
South-by-Southwest's Music Festival, held in Austin from March 7-16 of this year
(http://sxsw.com/music). She will be
participating in several gimmicks promoting the festival (and herself). What
kind of gimmicks are we talking about here? Peeing in a bucket? Howling in the
woods? Not quite.
Doritos has built a 64-foot vending
machine stage, which Forbes calls "obnoxious" and "tacky". The stage is powered
by tweets (whatever that means), and will distribute a prize: Gaga tickets.
Fans will have to perform ridiculous stunts in order to win those
tickets, including jumping from a 30-foot high platform to snatch a dangling
ticket, playing music in the streets to try and earn money (ten dollars in ten
minutes and you win!) and roller-derby in inflatable sumo suits against
professionals.
But what if you don't want to perform a stunt? Don't
worry! You can still get your Gaga ticket! You just have to allow Doritos to
give you a "stupid haircut"! How fun!
How... embarassing. What kind of
person allows their fans to be publicly humiliated in exchange for a ticket to
your show? Clearly Forbes has a point in calling Lady Gaga "cheapened", for
accepting a payment to allow this to happen.
One thing though: weren't a
bunch of her shows supposed to be sold out? So who is responsible for her shows
selling out, fans or corporations?
If Gaga's star isn't fading, she
would have no trouble selling out her shows as she used to. She wouldn't need to
rely on giveaways. And yet, here we are. Not only is she being forced to give
away tickets to her shows, she's allowing her fans to publicly embarrass
themselves in order to get them. I'm with Forbes when they say: this is
shameful.
"I just love the music, not the bling", she sings in the
title track ARTPOP.
Interesting. Let's see who Miss I-Hate-Money is
accepting the bling from anyway.
Doritos, which is owned by Frito-Lay, is
a subsidiary of PepsiCo. PepsiCo made $65.4 billion in sales last year and is
currently ranked 43 on the Fortune 500.
Wow! Not a bad company to
partner up with! Maybe with a conglomerate like that behind her, she'll finally
be able to compete with Katy Perry.
Thanks for the link Pizzazz!
