Which celebrity will we see in the little house? The question has been asked since it was announced that the DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOTos tour would pass through Spain. Anyone with an internet connection knows that this replica of a traditional Puerto Rican home, one of the stages of Bad Bunny’s live show designed by Mayna Magruder Oriz, is usually filled with familiar faces. Influencers, athletes, actresses, or popular figures walk inside and outside this residence that can hold about 30 people — the roof supports 20 — and inside there are sofas, a kitchen turned into a bar, screens showing what happens at the concert, and artworks by artists like Lorenzo Omar and Alexis Díaz.
Although Bad Bunny enters the house during the show, the audience waiting for content on social media is interested in what happens outside, on the porches. That’s where Penélope Cruz shouted “¡Acho, PR es otra cosa!” in August, and where between the Super Bowl and the Puerto Rican residence passed Karol G., Ricky Martin, Ana de Armas, Bad Gyal, Javier Bardem, Lionel Messi, Paco León, Kylian Mbappé, LeBron James, Salma Hayek, Pedro Pascal, and Jon Hamm was seen so happy and cool in bermuda shorts, a Hawaiian shirt, and a fisherman’s hat that the internet nicknamed him “Jon Jamón” from then on. Who would be in Barcelona and Madrid? At the first concert on Friday, mostly FC Barcelona footballers. Except for presenter Marc Giró, who kept a discreet background leaning against the wall, from sunset Lamine Yamal, FC Barcelona footballer, walked around the little house accompanied by his partner, influencer Inés García, along with other team players like Robert Lewandowski, Gavi, Pau Cubarsí, Dani Olmo, João Cancelo, and Eric García.
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Seeing VIPs at Bad Bunny’s live shows is not an isolated phenomenon. The big tours of recent years have added a new unwritten rule to their execution: that there is no concert without a celebrity with their viral moment. Rosalía knows this and that’s why she devised the confessional in the Lux Tour. The moment happens before singing La perla, when she invites familiar faces to rant about their ex. This space has featured from Lyas, the trendy influencer who debuted it in Lyon, to celebrities of all kinds, fitting into different algorithmic bubbles and niches. They have ranted about past loves from Esti of Soy una pringada or Aitana (Spain); model Cara Delevinge and singer Lola Young (London) or Najwa Nimri (Berlin). This clever roasting session has only confirmed the obvious: surprise celebrities are a trend that has become standardized so people keep paying attention to the big world tours.
How do you make a several-month tour where each live show is practically the same inside keep generating headlines and people not get tired of talking about that tour? By getting a viral moment at each stop. Having seen all the tricks of the show on the first day, artists now not only compete for the best stadium show but also to get the best moment: the one that will mark the scroll on Instagram or TikTok for the next hours, replicated to nausea, competing for the day’s attention with that surprise factor.
On the Brat tour, Charli XCX chose her “Apple Girls” from the VIP area of each concert to appear on the screens performing the choreography of the song of the same name (Chappell Roan, another pop diva, did it in Barcelona, to the delight of last year’s Primavera Sound attendees). Just before singing Juno, Sabrina Carpenter has ‘arrested’ a “too attractive” celebrity at each stop of Short n’ Sweet and has already handcuffed Nicole Kidman, Anne Hathaway, Gigi Hadid, sisters Elle & Dakota Fanning, Salma Hayek, or Millie Bobby Brown, among others.
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And all of TikTok has wondered who will be the next “Sally.” Since releasing his hit song Sally, When The Wine Runs Out, Role Model — also known as Tucker Pillsbury, a 28-year-old musician who is the current partner of actress Dakota Johnson — invites an attendee to come up at each concert to dance like the Sally of the night. It doesn’t matter if you know any of his songs or not, the internet has been flooded with clips of Natalie Portman, Kate Hudson, or Olivia Rodrigo on stage dancing to the song with the singer.
“The music industry is exploiting a well-known mechanism in the entertainment industry, which is the morbid curiosity aroused by seeing the stars,” points out sociologist and musician Hans Laguna. “The interest lies in making people somehow participate in that superior and unattainable realm in which celebrities live,” clarifies the author of the recent essay Yo siendo yo. El teatro de la autenticidad de las estrellas pop (Anagrama).
Laguna sees in Bad Bunny’s little house a narrative leap compared to other surprise formulas with great acceptance in recent years. “With C. Tangana and the El madrileño tour, which was an album that obscenely resorted to the resource of guest star collaborations, we could see that interest in which stars would appear on stage to perform the songs because the stage itself was conceived as a big party of illustrious characters. What Bad Bunny has done is take a new turn: they are no longer even artists related to music or those he has worked with, but celebrities in general,” he explains.
The battle for conversation in the hours following the live show, on social media or in the office coffee break, is so fierce that it goes beyond placing celebrities on stage. The need to generate content so that that video is TikTok’s favorite treat the next day has extended to every possible formula: Zara Larsson’s Lush life has had a second life thanks to the choreography created on stage with fans. Dua Lipa covers traditional songs from the place of each live show: she sang Bésame mucho in Mexico, Héroe by Enrique Iglesias in Spain, and Highway to hell in Australia, and Drake gives gifts to his fans at each live show. So much effort for those peaks of momentary attention can also backfire. Just ask the adulterers affected by Coldplay’s Kiss cam. Not everyone longs for their viral moment of the current tour.
