Doja Cat Is Right: Music Fans Should Care Less About Streams and Statistics

Doja Cat does not seem to enjoy being famous. She’s a chart-topping award winner who headlines festivals and performs at the Oscars, but off the stage, she is pretty much a proud troll who thinks fame and adoration are ridiculous. You often get the sense with Doja that she’s eager to make her own fans like her a little less, whether it’s through her many social media controversies, her documented past of playing around in racist chatrooms, or taking selfies while wearing a t-shirt of an alt-right ‘comedian’ with a history of spreading antisemitic conspiracy theories. Frankly, it’s kind of a miracle that she remains as widely famous and acclaimed as she has, given her eagerness to undo all of that.

Most recently, in a far tamer and now-deleted tweet, Doja called out the music fans who care too much about streaming numbers and statistics.

Doja Cat encourages chart-obsessed fans to look after themselves and to go outside:

“the amount of streams on a song isn't indicative of the quality or effort put into it. If you disagree with this you could be having an episode and should seek love from the outside.”

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— Pop Crave (@popcrave.com) May 2, 2025 at 9:18 AM

“The amount of streams on a song isn’t indicative of the quality or effort put into it,” she wrote in the now-deleted post. “If you disagree with this you could be having an episode and should seek love from the outside. Go for a run. Take a look in the mirror and ask yourself in the safety of your mind if you are proud of that person or if you even like what you see. Next, do not punish yourself. Do not sabotage. Rather take it as an opportunity to become an even better version of who you once were. Look at it as the beginning of a fulfilling life. You deserve an adventure. You deserve to feel the sun on your skin. Don’t trade that for being on this app with the blinds drawn. You deserve more.”

Okay, SO. Is the tone of this post obviously intended to be kind of trolly and mocking of these people, many of whom are her own fans? Yes. That’s Doja’s default mode. Is she wrong? No.

This is a fandom issue I’ve had a problem with for a while now. There’s this feverish obsession over the most inconsequential of statistics. Everyone seems so concerned with the minute details of a song’s Spotify rankings as a sign not only of an artist’s success but also of their artistic merits. This isn’t new. Getting your faves to number one is part of the fun, but now it feels more like a job than ever.

Streaming’s business model is a deliberately exploitative one that pays way WAY less than a cent per stream, but it’s also now the default for measuring an artist’s success. They need to be streamed millions and millions of times to be seen as a star, but see so few financial benefits from that. I imagine a lot of stans feel the need to help out however they can, and there are plenty of artists, record labels, and managers eager to encourage a little streaming fraud to help fudge the numbers. It’s not uncommon to see fans brag about playing a song repeatedly on low volume day and night to help its Spotify ranks. Passion is one thing, but it feels like this has turned being a fan into an unpaid full-time internship.

It’s not just music either. I see movie fans far too concerned with Rotten Tomatoes scores and box office grosses. What is there to gain by getting mad that your new favourite film’s Letterboxd average is lower than some film you didn’t like? TV fans, especially on streaming, feel enormous pressure to do Spotify-esque binge-watches and repeats for fear that their views only count in a certain way because of how platforms like Netflix work to obscure the data and cancel everything after three weeks of release.

Why is this the game now? It’s exhausting. There’s no fun in having to treat pop culture like a grind. Everything else has already become an interminable hustle, too much work for not enough benefits. Can’t we just listen to a song and not panic over how it might have 500 fewer streams than some other artist we’ve deemed their enemy for no dang reason?

So, well done, Doja. The metronome has swung from ‘Jesus what the f*ck is she talking about’ right back to ‘alright, fair dos, I think that’s a salient point.’ She’s like the Joyce Carol Oates of rap.