Pop star economics
Rob Long
In case you were having a good day, just minding your own business and at peace with the world, let me ruin it for you: according to a recent report, Justin Bieber, the Canadian-born pop singer, is worth somewhere around $300 million.
Actually, there’s no reason why he shouldn’t be that rich. He’s an international singing sensation, and ever since the early days of crooners like Frank Sinatra, skinny boys who can sing tend to make a lot of money.
Celebrities like Bieber don’t just become rich themselves. They make everyone around them rich, too. Agents, lawyers, managers, friends, parents, you name it — there’s a swarm of rich pilot fish swimming around the Big Shark Bieber, feasting on whatever falls from his jaws.
Which means right now, as you read this, there’s a small constellation of folks trying to find the next Justin Bieber.
As it happens, I think I’ve found him. There’s a skinny young singer from Kazakhstan, almost exactly Bieber’s age, who is currently wowing them in Central Asia, India, and other places we can call Not Hollywood, and, no disrespect to Bieber, this guy can really sing.
His name is Dimash Kudaibergenov, and he’s a world-famous young heartthrob you’ve probably never heard of. I discovered Kudaibergenov the old-fashioned way — through a series of Twitter retweets very late at night that led me down a YouTube rabbit hole.
But like all great discoveries, this one comes with a complication, at least from the point of view of those of us who work in Hollywood. Dimash Kudaibergenov is called Dimash Kudaibergenov, which is hard to pronounce and even harder to spell and doesn’t fit on a T-shirt. Dimash Kudaibergenov. That’s a mouthful. Look, Gordon Sumner is a pretty normal name — maybe too normal — but even Gordon knew he needed to change his name to Sting to give himself a little memorable (and easy to spell) pizzazz. And there’s nothing hard to spell about the name David Jones, but David Bowie sounds a lot more showbizzy.
(In the interests of full disclosure, I must tell you that the only way I could write this column was to write the name Dimash Kudaibergenov once, copy it to the clipboard, and paste it instead of trying to remember how to spell it.)
So this young neo-Bieber has got a too-complicated name, and he’s from an almost unpronounceable place — but all of those problems are easy to solve, frankly. If his star continues on its current trajectory, pretty soon he’ll be just “Dimash,” and it won’t matter that he was once from Kazakhstan because he’ll be living in Malibu, surrounded by expensive cars and Kardashians.
But from a quick investigation of his YouTube channel — hundreds of millions of views, by the way, with live concert footage from places you’ve never heard of and couldn’t locate on a map — it’s not clear that Kudaibergenov speaks English, which is probably the only thing holding him back. To really go big, you have to be able to joke around with Jimmy Kimmel and host Saturday Night Live and improvise with the audience like Harry Styles does in his concerts.
Learning to speak English, it turns out, isn’t so hard. I was in Cairo last week and met a friend for the first time. He and I have been exchanging tweets for three years and had agreed that if I ever came to Cairo, we would meet in person over an Egyptian coffee. Which we did. The first thing that struck me was his perfect English — and not English English but American English, with up-to-the-minute slang terms and idiomatic expressions, unaccented and fluent. He sounded like a typical American young man in his mid-20s. You’d never guess he had never set foot outside Egypt.
“How did your English get so good?” I asked him.
“I don’t really speak English,” he said. “I speak Friends.”
That’s how he learned: He simply watched episodes of Friends over and over again, throwing in some Disney Channel sitcoms and some Full House episodes for variety, and the result was better than a million hours of Duolingo or Rosetta Stone. He didn’t so much learn to speak American as learn to be American.
That’s my advice to Dimash Kudaibergenov, in case he’s reading this column. Learn to speak English the way your fans speak it — like characters on a television show. And please remember this excellent counsel when you become Dimash of Malibu with $300 million. I’d be a terrific pilot fish.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.