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Are Teen Pop Stars a Thing of the Past?

Industry insiders explain why teen superstars have become increasingly rare.

“We would take kids off the street, put them on TV in front of 15 million people twice a week, and then by the end of that show, they were famous,” says Brown, who recently co-founded the indie label Heatwave Records. At the dawn of the social media age, they started harvesting talent from YouTube (like Justin Bieber and Troye Sivan) and Vine (like Shawn Mendes) and plugging them into the major-label machine that created pop juggernauts. In a landscape full of viral singles and myriad sub-pockets of fandom, many labels are taking the approach of “let’s sign more small things, but in the aggregate they’re equivalent to a star,” says Leon Morabia, a partner at Mark Music & Media Law.

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