The writer’s remark that streaming parties ‘hand record labels thousa…

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My younger sister Zoya keeps a spreadsheet on her phone, and it is not for exams. It lists time slots, each with a name, and the rules at the top say nobody mutes the video and nobody loops it from a single account. When her favourite K-pop group drops a new song, forty strangers from Pune to Manila follow that sheet all weekend. They call it a streaming party, though nobody seems to be having much fun.

I used to find this faintly absurd. Why should a nineteen-year-old treat a view count like a civic duty? Then, on one singer’s birthday, I watched her fan group raise money for a children’s ward in a single evening. Other fandoms plant trees in a singer’s name, or send sacks of rice to a concert instead of flowers, and the rice is given away later. None of this is ordered from above. It is planned by people who have never met.

So I no longer laugh. A crowd that can do this is learning something many adults never learn: how to act together without waiting for a leader. But the same muscle that fills a charity box can flatten a person. Last month Zoya’s chat turned on a reviewer who had called a song dull. They flooded her replies until she locked her account. And the streaming parties, for all their team spirit, hand record labels thousands of hours of free labour.

The fans I know are not naive about this. Some argue about it more sharply than any critic. Still, my admiration has become a wary one. Zoya says the reviewer deserved it. I am not sure she believes that, because she said it without looking up from the sheet.