Kapurch, Katie: The Disneyfication of Pop

The Disneyfication of Pop: With the Beatles, Beyoncé, and Taylor Swift reveals a new theory of hyper-commodified pop by shattering the mirrors that reflect the carefully crafted images of musical icons. This is the first-ever book to explore how pop stars dip into the Walt Disney Company's glittery "Disneydust" to create and market their music, corporate personas, and related products. In doing so, this book exposes unseen relationships between the Beatles, Beyoncé, and Swift, who are sexy but safe, exciting yet comforting-much like Disney media.

The Beatles, Beyoncé, and Swift have all collaborated with Disney, releasing films on its streaming platform since 2020. Yet the Disneyfication of pop is more than licensing-and more than Paul McCartney's Bambi eyes or "Queen Bey" or Swift's many versions of Cinderella. Disneyfication involves bundled media and marketing strategies that allow for massive profitability over a timespan much longer than the typical pop career. The Disneyfied Beatles began in the 1960s when the band laid the groundwork for legacy efforts that cultivated fans in subsequent generations. A classic Disney strategy, this kind of multi-generational appeal echoes loudly in the Bey and Swift phenomena, too.

This book uncovers pop's heretofore unacknowledged debts to Disney aesthetics and processes of production, distribution, and reception. Disney dynamics lead audiences to see their own reflections in Disneyfied superstars who function as both prince and princess and whose songs exist in imagined safe spaces as policed and protected as Sleeping Beauty's castle. However awe-inspiring pop's once-upon-a-times can be, they also signify, like the Disney logo, illusory promises.