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Madison Beer is driving around Los Angeles, casually talking up her fantastic new album Locket, when I pivot to a subject that suddenly pricks up her ears. I’m not sure if she’s aware, I say, but Australia’s world-first social media ban for under-16s is set to go into effect just days after we speak.
“Really? That’s incredible! Honestly, I think that’s amazing,” exclaims Beer, who boasts more than 40 million followers on Instagram and another 20 million on TikTok. “I’m sorry to any under-16-year-olds who are probably very upset right now, but … Wait, so you’re saying that when they turn 16, they can then use it again?”
Yes, exactly.
“That’s still so young! Prior to 16, you don’t need to be on social media. I know that it might be hard if you’ve been on it, and especially as we live in a time where every waking millisecond is ‘social media, social media, social media.’ But I promise you, you’re only going to look back and be grateful. At least, that’s my opinion. I wish someone would have taken my phone away at that age.”
If anyone has an informed opinion on the good and bad effects of social media, it’s Madison Beer. The singer was barely 13 years old in 2012 when Justin Bieber tweeted a YouTube video of her singing Etta James’ At Last to his millions of followers, igniting her music career.
Instantly, she was signed by Bieber’s then-manager Scooter Braun, and to a record deal with Island Records. To pursue her pop dreams, she dropped out of school and moved from New York to Los Angeles with her family, and hit the road touring. When she turned 14, Bieber even brought her onstage at the UK’s The O2 arena and sang “Happy Birthday” to her in front of 20,000 people.
But, in the typical tradition of teen stardom, it wasn’t long before the opportunity soured. Away from her hometown friends, she felt lonely and isolated in Los Angeles. A lack of creative control in decisions over her art and her image meant she felt alienated from the work she was producing.
Beer’s memoir, The Half Of It, published in April 2023, is a harrowing read. In it, she reveals that she was sexually assaulted at a party in LA when she was 14. At 15, nude photos of herself, which she’d privately sent via Snapchat to a boyfriend in a romantic moment, were leaked online. Fearful of the impact on her reputation and work, she spent her savings to employ an internet sheriff to track and take down the photos online.
Amid this tumult, her worst fear manifested. At 16, her label and manager dropped her. Her pop career seemingly over, she fell into a period of depression, self-harm and Xanax dependence, and attempted suicide. By the time she was 16, she writes, she’d been receiving hate mail, death threats and online abuse for four consecutive years.
‘I would love for kids to be kids as long as they can be, and I think social media isn’t really the place for that.’
At one point in the book, Beer darkly quips that it could have been called “How to Give Someone Borderline Personality Disorder”. At times, it feels like a manifesto warning parents on why they shouldn’t let their kids pursue a career in show business in the digital age.
“It really is,” Beer laughs. The book, she says, was an attempt to demystify young people’s obsession with fame and pull the curtain back on the facade of social media.
“I realised very early into my career that social media is everyone putting their best foot forward. We only post our highlight reel. In the past couple of years with TikTok, maybe it’s gotten a bit better and people can actually be more vulnerable, but I still think that when you post things online that are like, ‘I’m having a hard day’, people roll their eyes like, ‘Oh, it’s performative’.”
Especially so when you’re a world-famous pop star with a lifestyle that’s the envy of many. Beer makes a point to acknowledge her privilege and the fact that her “dreams of selling out shows and singing to people are literally coming true every day”, but “there’s other stuff that comes with it,” she says.
“I don’t know that many people that got signed before their 13th birthday and then had their upbringing in the era of the rise of social media. It was very intense, and it was uncharted territory at the time. I was a guinea pig. It was not something that people knew how to navigate yet.”
Even now, with her 27th birthday approaching, Beer’s relationship with social media remains complicated. After all, it’s what gave her her career. But it also very nearly ruined her life. Does she ever think about what her life would have been like if she hadn’t been exposed to years of online abuse at such a young age? Would she have found a way to still make it in her career without social media?
“It’s hard for me to say because it’s had a huge influence on my career. It’s how a lot of people know me. But if everything was the same minus social media, do I think that I would probably be a bit healthier and not have as many issues? Yeah, most likely!” Beer laughs.
“I think it can be a really great tool and I’m thankful for my platform, my fans, my supporters. But there’s a lot of bad people out there that are vicious and hurtful and forget that even people with an ‘M’ after their follower number have feelings and aren’t just these creatures they click a button on. I think this whole era is something we are going to look back at and be like, ‘Wow, that wasn’t normal. That was not good.’”
Madison Beer walks the runway during the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show in October.Credit: Evan Agostini/Invision/AP
Having come out on the other side, she now clearly recognises how traumatic her childhood experience was. “I sometimes have trouble talking about all this because if you haven’t read my book, or you don’t really know my story, you might be like, ‘Oh please, what have you gone through?’” Beer says.
“But think of being bullied in high school, but it’s on the biggest scale and with millions of people, and it feels like the whole world is pointing and laughing at you. I don’t think I would want my kid to be exposed to millions of people at 12. There’s no good reason for it. But also, my parents were just doing it for me! It was, ‘This is her dream. She was born wanting to sing and she’s getting this opportunity …’ And again, in 2012, this was all uncharted territory. There was no TikTok. There was nothing but your Instagram that you followed your friends on, so it didn’t feel as big and scary. Things are ever-changing, but I would say I would love for kids to be kids as long as they can be, and I think social media isn’t really the place for that, if I’m being super honest.”
While her shows are renowned for becoming impromptu therapy sessions where Beer, now a sort of elder sister to her fans, enacts lengthy (and often thematically heavy) Q&A sessions where she imparts her hard-won advice to her young fans, until recently discussion online has remained sceptical about the singer. Reddit is filled with threads pondering Beer’s inside-out standing in the pop world, where she has a hefty profile but not a recognisable hit to hang on it.
Her first album, 2021’s Life Support, released as an independent artist after being dropped by her record label, was fascinatingly weird and overstuffed, heavy on gothic music box melodies (and even a Rick and Morty sample) to signify the corrupted youth she’d emerged from. Her second, 2023’s Silence Between Songs, was subdued to the point of narcolepsy, leaning into ballads and psychedelic ambience, largely inspired by her love of Kevin Parker. (Beer even has the word Eventually, a song from Tame Impala’s Currents, tattooed on her finger. Has she ever thought about reaching out to Parker to collaborate? “Noooo! That would be like reaching out to God!” Beer shrieks.)
Her new album Locket (again created with her regular collaborator Leroy Clampitt), however, finds a sweet balance between the Ariana-style vocal runs that are her bread and butter and a welcome new foray into upbeat dance-pop. Beyond the already ubiquitous hit singles Yes Baby and Bittersweet, highlights include Angel Wings, a dark-but-playful kiss-off to a loser ex, and Bad Enough, an escalating doo-wop that suggests she might be pop’s top reigning vocalist. Add in a recent Grammy nomination for her sensuous dance single Make You Mine, and an acclaimed performance at last year’s Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show, and the scene is set for Madison Beer to have her overdue moment.
“I’ve just grown a lot, I’m in a much better place, and creatively that’s reflected in this album,” Beer says. “I wasn’t trying to make anything other than just an album I was proud of, so it was a very freeing experience.”
Beer admits she feels an unprecedented spike of anticipation around the release. She’s also recently found herself back in the tabloids, thanks to a relatively new relationship with NFL quarterback Justin Herbert of the Los Angeles Chargers. Given what she went through, is the attention triggering or is she able to handle it better now?
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“I think being 26 is definitely helpful versus, you know, being 13 or 14 or 15 or whatever,” she says. “I’ve come to a point where I have a much healthier relationship with it and I try not to let it affect me because I definitely feel like I have a lot of good in my real life and I try to just be present in that.”
After toiling in the business for so long, will she be disappointed if Locket doesn’t make a dent on the charts, or is she beyond thinking about her music in that way? “I’d be lying if I said I wouldn’t be a little bummed if it didn’t get recognition because I think this project deserves it. But I don’t tether my self-worth to numbers and things like that any more. I feel good with my career. I feel good with myself. I don’t think I need to prove anything to anyone. I’m kind of okay with it all. Actually, I’m more than happy with it.”
Madison Beer’s Locket is out on January 16.
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