The glow of my laptop illuminated my features perfectly, exhaustion written under my eyes, hands furiously typing in my card details into the checkout box. There I was, adrenaline pumping through my veins at 6 a.m., as my roommate’s alarm started ringing. It didn’t distract me, no, not at all. I was determined to win the greatest modern battle known to mankind: The Ticketmaster War.
My breath came shallow, my fingers hovered, my body tensed. “I can do this,” I whispered, a mantra against the spinning wheel of doom, as show after show blinked into “SOLD OUT.” And then — finally — I hit confirm, and the email came immediately: Your order has been registered. Only then did I exhale. I had survived! I had won!
I should’ve collapsed into sleep, but instead I sat there grinning in the glow of my inbox. I wasn’t just going to see The Weeknd — I had won entry into an experience that thousands of other fans were fighting for.
Abel Tesfaye (The Weeknd, for those who are uneducated) appeared in 2011 as a faceless voice uploaded to YouTube: aching falsetto, woozy beats and lyrics steeped in lust and loneliness. There was nothing, no explanation — just music that felt like it had bled out of the night. That anonymity was the spark. To be XO (the name for our fandom) in those early years was to be in on a secret.
Sitting there in the morning hours, my body still shaking, a certain question arose in my mind: How does this happen? How does a voice coming through your headphones turn into something you’re willing to sacrifice sleep, sanity and your card limit for? When does listening slip into devotion?
This is the heart of fandom. At its simplest, fandom is a community of devotion — people united not just by taste but by ritual, by language and by how an artist’s work weaves itself into their daily lives. It’s more than listening to songs or watching shows; it’s forming an identity around them.
Sociologists describe fandoms as “affective publics,” groups built on shared emotion that ripple outward into collective action. Psychologists call it parasocial intimacy: a one-sided but deeply felt relationship we develop with artists who seem to speak directly to us. But to fans, it doesn’t feel like theory — it feels like home.
Fandom is what turns music from sound into experience. It’s the reason people camped outside stadiums before The Weeknd’s concerts or refreshed Ticketmaster until their hands shook. It’s about belonging. The anticipation of seeing my favorite artist, the thrill of the live show and the suspense of waiting for that confirmation email all stir up intense emotions.
Biochemically, these moments light up the brain’s reward centers. The surge of pure joy and relief I felt when I saw “order confirmed” wasn’t imagined; it was a hit of dopamine flooding my system. Researchers note that this kind of positive reinforcement loop encourages us to dive even deeper into our fandom. No wonder we keep lining up (virtually or in person) for more.
“ Every album release, every surprise announcement or ticket drop, becomes another chance for that euphoric payoff. ”
Still, there’s a deeper meaning to the term fandom. They are born because art refuses to remain silent inside us, instead demanding to be echoed, carried and shared. A song breaks something open in your chest, and almost instinctively you search for others who felt that same shiver, who heard their own lives refracted in the lyric. That is the spark. Fandom doesn’t begin under stadium lights — it begins in solitude, when a private feeling grows too vast to be held by one person alone.
From there, fandom gathers shape, ritual and language: listening to the artist’s entire discography until you memorize every lyric, buying limited edition merch items and trying to understand the symbolism woven into every project. The artist strikes the match, but it is the fans who build the fire. In that fire, the music transforms.
The Weeknd’s fans don’t just consume music; we enter a world where nothing is fully explained. That’s the genius of this fandom: intimacy born out of distance. Abel doesn’t hand us neat answers. Instead, he leaves space for us to build meaning, and through that act of co-creation, we form an unshakeable bond. The passion and engagement blend into something magical. There’s a distinctive electricity in the air at a live show, a kind of communal euphoria that’s impossible to describe — thousands of voices singing the chorus to “After Hours” in unison, or an entire stadium erupting when The Weeknd says, “This is for the OG XO fans.”
In those moments, every individual in the crowd is part of one body, moving as if it shared a single pulse. The barriers between strangers fall away; you lock eyes with someone you’ve never met and scream the lyrics together. Social barriers were nonexistent because a sense of belonging among everyone existed. I wasn’t a stranger — I was a part of it. I screamed until my voice broke, sang lyrics I had memorized, and when my eyes caught someone else’s across the pit, it wasn’t awkward. It was recognition. For a few hours, loneliness had no grip.
That’s what fandom does — it dissolves the edges of isolation. It takes the private intensity of listening alone in your room and multiplies it until it fills an arena. It’s not about escape; it’s about amplification. The songs don’t take you out of yourself; they drop you deeper into who you are in a room full of others who are doing the same. You come away altered, not because you discovered the artist, but because you discovered yourself refracted in a thousand other bodies. When The Weeknd sings about the hollow glow of nightlife, the emptiness in desire, you feel less haunted by your own shadows. The fandom is born in that moment — when recognition demands witness.
And so fandom isn’t just devotion to an artist — it’s a survival mechanism. It’s how we metabolize the feelings that otherwise stay stuck, how we move them from the inside out. It’s messy and irrational — why else would anyone stay up until dawn to fight a faceless queue for a chance at a ticket? But in the end, that irrationality is the point. It’s proof that we still hunger for connection strong enough to drag us out of sleep, out of solitude, out of ourselves.
In the quiet after the last encore, I think about that 6 a.m. glow, my exhaustion and my desperation — and it all makes sense. I wasn’t chasing a concert. I was chasing being impossibly alive.
Bianca Mirica PO ’29 believes in three constants: cats, coffee and choruses by Taylor Swift or The Weeknd. She treats novels like sacred objects, gangster movies like moral philosophy, and suspects her bookshelf is one bad purchase away from collapse.