Beyoncé launched her solo career in 2003 with the album ‘Dangerously in Love’ after 14 years with the group Destiny’s Child. She has included songs from that album on her ongoing world tour, dubbed the Renaissance Tour, which landed in Stockholm in May. The concert was so successful that Queen Bey – as she is known to her fans – was blamed for keeping Sweden’s inflation rate higher than expected that month, given the drop in energy and food prices.
Michael Grahn, chief economist at Danske Bank, estimated that the concert – spread over two nights – added 0.2 to 0.3 percentage points to the country’s inflation as tens of thousands of people flocked to Stockholm from at home and abroad. Hotels, restaurants and other entertainment and hospitality services saw a huge increase in demand and prices went up.
It may seem remarkable that a single artist’s concert can spark enough economic activity to affect a country’s inflation. But Beyoncé is a megastar and Sweden has a population of just 10 million, which is less than half the size of Delhi. Consider a big event like the Football World Cup or the Olympics. We would not be surprised if we are told that the host city or region has experienced high inflation due to such incidents.
Movies, television, music, sports, fiction, food, gaming, dance, drama – the universe of entertainment is huge, and growing. Once a society is advanced enough that subsistence is no longer an issue for most people, entertainment becomes a major focus. But it’s not always wholesome or appreciable. The fascination with soccer in Latin America and beauty queens in Colombia serves to distract people from grossly unequal lives and thus helps prevent political discontent from turning into mass insurgency. Entertainment is also part of consumerist culture – consuming for social distinction rather than to satisfy an innate need or desire.
One way to define art is as an expression of creativity meant to engage with the aesthetic sensibilities of others. Such an endeavor may fall anywhere on a continuum, one end of which produces only momentary pleasure while the other provides an experiential path to the fullness of existence, which religion and philosophy seek in their own ways. The precise point on this continuum that separates entertainment from the unconscious is a function of a society’s cultural development. But it is safe to assume that a large part of the continuum lends itself to the label of ‘entertainment’.
At lower levels of income – where taking time away from the toil of making a living for something as trivial as pleasure is considered nothing short of reprehensible – travel takes the form of pilgrimage. After all, spiritual fulfillment is a noble goal at any level of income. Traveling to holy places combines the joy of traveling and experiencing new places, food and cultures, as well as the immeasurable qualities of divinity. Even at this stage, travel has an element of entertainment. When travel openly pursues sun, sand and nightlife, the element of entertainment in the tourism industry increases dramatically.
Modern manufacturing is capital- and knowledge-intensive and does not require a lot of workers. It is the service sector that will create most of the jobs of tomorrow. We generally associate the service sector with banking and financial services, retail, travel and hospitality, public administration, health, education, communication, etc. We see entertainment as their poor brother. But Beyoncé’s impact on Swedish inflation shows that entertainment can drive other sectors of the service industry.
In the Indian context, parents should stop pushing their artistically gifted children to become engineers, doctors and chartered accountants and let them develop their creative talents. Entertainment is set to become a major driver of the overall services sector, which has far outpaced industry and agriculture. Those who fail to become stars like Shahrukh Khan or Beyonce, they are not destined to die of hunger. Dance, music, lighting, sound, dubbing, voice-over and hundreds, if not thousands, of other areas of entertainment will create millions of well-paying jobs.
It is not a matter of disdaining engineering, medicine and finance, but the creative juices of our youth stream. The point is to foster excellence and achieving it requires persistence and discipline, not particular areas of academic endeavor. Excellence and passion will create high-value jobs across all sectors, an increasing proportion of which will overlap with entertainment.
If a youth wants to make a career in entertainment, comedies and all other fields, it is fine. Not every author of computer code becomes Satya Nadella or Nandan Nilekani. Nor does every entertainer become Beyoncé. There are some worthwhile careers beyond strobe lights, which can catalyze jobs in other areas. Bravo, Beyonce, even if that insight comes at a cost!
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Updated: June 16, 2023, 12:50 PM IST