Looking to the Stars: Celebrity Music Fandom the Search for Spiritual Meaning

Scholars have considered the increase of fandom and celebrity worship alongside the decline of organized religion, theorizing that fans look to the media and celebrities they ‘worship’ to find meaning in a secularized world. Limited empirical studies provide inconclusive results on the relationship between meaning, religion, and celebrity fandom. Participants completed a survey of celebrity worship, fan identity, eudaimonic and hedonic preferences in music/media selection, meaning in life, spirituality, and religion. Study 1 participants (N = 209) were undergraduates at William & Mary; participants in Study 2 (N= 201) were celebrity music fans (primarily of Taylor Swift and the Grateful Dead) recruited through online fan groups. In Study 1, participants whose favorite celebrity was an athlete or musician had the highest levels of CW and fan identity. Spirituality and religiosity positively correlated with celebrity worship in both Study 1 and Study 2. Results of Study 2 indicated that celebrity worship and fandom relate to the search for and presence of meaning in life in general and in music listening specifically, providing valuable insight into the motivations and outcomes of fandom. Study 2 found that fans were more interested in finding meaning than pleasure in the music they listened to; Study 1 found this result to be true only when considering music preferences specifically and not media consumption in general. Overall, results indicated a relationship between fandom and the search for spiritual meaning, and that this relationship may look different between fandoms.