Platformed Empowerment across Pop Markets and the Viral Intimacy and Curated Hybridity of PinkPantheress and Lexie Liu
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.54097/dqv9qg28Keywords:
Platformization, popular music, gender, authenticity, cultural hybridity, PinkPantheress, Lexie LiuAbstract
This article advances a comparative hermeneutic account of how PinkPantheress and Lexie Liu orchestrate aesthetic sovereignty and audience connection within institutionally differentiated popular-music platform ecologies. It reconceptualizes empowerment as a situated capacity to author music, calibrate visibility and sustain semiotically recognizable relations with listeners instead of treating popularity as a self-evident measure of autonomy. A comparative qualitative case study examines a purposive corpus of public interviews, artist-controlled audiovisual releases, platform pages and question-and-answer exchanges published between 2019 and 2025. Reflexive thematic and multimodal content analysis identifies two contrasting yet convergent aesthetic dispositifs. PinkPantheress develops viral intimacy through compressed songs, understated self-presentation, domestic production narratives and selective privacy. Lexie Liu develops curated hybridity through bilingual writing, sumptuous audiovisual world-building and controlled movement between Chinese and global cultural references. In both cases, authorship and persona become resources for relational legibility. Platform visibility nonetheless produces infrastructural dependency. Viral legibility can constrict future expectations and cross-cultural legibility can invite reductive exegesis. The comparison proposes platformed empowerment as a negotiated and reversible constellation of creative control, platform affordances and audience recognition. The article contributes a circumspect cross-market framework that refuses to treat artists as national synecdoches or public engagement metrics as incontrovertible evidence of loyalty.
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