Some superstars were built by an algorithm — discovered, boosted, and sustained by whatever a streaming platform's recommendation engine decided to surface. Others were famous before that machine ever existed, built on radio rotation, MTV airplay, magazine covers, and physical album sales, with the algorithm arriving afterward to a career that no longer needed it to survive. Music journalist Tatiana Cirisano has a name for the second group: class 1 superstars.1
A class 1 superstar established themselves before streaming took hold as the industry's dominant mode of discovery and consumption.1 Swift belongs to this category, and so do Adele, Beyoncé, and Rihanna — artists who built loyal fan bases in an earlier competitive landscape, facing less fragmentation and fewer competitors for attention than any newcomer trying to break through in the current, streaming-saturated market.1
That's a specific and useful distinction, because it separates two very different kinds of success that can look identical from a chart-position view. A newer artist who breaks through via streaming owes their fame to the algorithm's ongoing cooperation — lose the algorithm's favor, and the fame is genuinely at risk. A class 1 superstar's fame was built on a foundation the algorithm didn't create and mostly can't dismantle, which gives them a kind of structural insulation newer artists simply don't have.
Here's the part worth sitting with: being a class 1 superstar is both a genuine advantage and a specific liability, and they're not separate qualities — they're the same underlying fact viewed from two angles. The insulation from streaming's disruption meant Swift could resist the platform far longer than a newer artist could have afforded to, without her career actually being at risk. That's the advantage. But the same insulation also meant she had less urgent pressure to adapt early, since her business wasn't actually threatened by staying out of the streaming ecosystem the way a newer act's would have been.1 That's the liability, and it's the exact mechanism behind the premium-position captivity this artist's Lover-era stumble represents.
It's worth being precise about what class 1 status doesn't disappear once an artist finally does adapt. Even after Swift embraced streaming fully, she retained a strategic option unavailable to artists without her specific history: she could still rely on tactics from before streaming existed — physical album sales at a scale most contemporary artists can't touch, event-style PR campaigns, massive vinyl and CD sales to an audience that had otherwise abandoned the format — as one tool alongside newer, streaming-native tactics, rather than being forced to choose one toolkit exclusively.1 A newer superstar built entirely inside the streaming era doesn't have that older toolkit available to fall back on at all.
You're trying to understand why a comparison between two seemingly similar superstars — similar chart success, similar cultural presence — keeps producing different strategic behavior when a new platform or distribution shift emerges.
Check when each artist actually built their initial fame relative to the shift in question. An artist whose foundational success predates the disruption has a genuinely different risk profile than one whose success depends on adapting to it in real time — which explains why one might resist a new platform confidently for years while the other has no choice but to embrace it immediately, and neither behavior is necessarily more "correct" given their actually different structural positions.
Cirisano's "class 1 superstar" framing is a specific, attributable piece of music-industry analysis, and the named comparison set (Adele, Beyoncé, Rihanna, Swift) is a checkable, coherent category rather than an arbitrary grouping. The tension: the book doesn't specify a precise cutoff for what counts as "before streaming took hold" — the boundary between a late class 1 superstar and an early streaming-native one is treated as intuitively obvious rather than rigorously defined, which makes the category useful as a rough heuristic but imprecise as an analytical tool.
The book uses this category approvingly to explain Swift's resilience, without examining its more uncomfortable implication: that class 1 status is largely a matter of timing, not talent or strategy — an accident of when an artist happened to break through relative to a structural industry shift neither they nor their competitors controlled. The book's broader thesis credits Swift's strategic genius extensively; this specific advantage complicates that thesis slightly, since being insulated from streaming's initial disruption wasn't itself a strategic choice.
Premium-Position Captivity — this page names the category of artist most exposed to that page's trap; being a class 1 superstar is precisely what generates the insulation that turns into captivity, since the very success that predates a disruption is what removes the urgency to adapt to it early.
Catalog Streaming's Dominance Trend — class 1 superstars are disproportionately the artists whose catalogs now dominate streaming consumption; their pre-streaming-era fame is precisely what generated the large back catalogs now driving the 72 percent catalog-streaming statistic that page documents.
Sharpest implication: an artist's resilience to a platform disruption often has less to do with strategic foresight than with simple timing — whether their foundational fame was built before or after the disruption arrived — which means comparing two artists' adaptation strategies without accounting for this timing difference risks crediting or blaming strategy for what's actually a structural accident of career chronology.
Generative questions: