Ever since Beyoncé erupted into our consciousness over 20 years ago, as a shining, fully-formed megastar, she has possessed an unparalleled, preternatural ability to not just create music and media that encapsulated the popular mood, but to dictate it in a way that beggars belief. And with her remix of Megan Thee Stallion‘s TikTok dance craze-spawning ”’Savage”, her power to influence demand in even the most unlikely of markets is showing no sign of slowing down.
Rapping across a number of incredibly fire and deliciously braggadocious verses about her fortune, her killer ass, and her beloved-by-all mother, she unleashed the already infamous line: ‘Hips TikTok when I dance/On that Demon Time she might start an OnlyFans’, prompting — according to their CEO — a 15% uptick in traffic to the subscription-based site, which primarily plays home to amateur and more seasoned pornographers alike.
This is not the first time Beyoncé’s lyrics have caused a spike in the demand of goods she herself wasn’t peddling. With the release of Formation, her 2016, zeitgeist-defining celebration of her African-American roots, she caused a 33% spike in Red Lobster’s sales by name dropping the restaurant chain. Later, the release of her critically acclaimed album, Lemonade, reportedly caused sales of literal lemonade to double in some places. This is what some fans and cultural critics refer to as ‘The Beyoncé Effect’. While the Kardashian-Jenners of the world undoubtedly command the ability to drive their captive audience to whatever trend they’ve engineered to make a profit from, Beyonce’s influence over entire market trends — for which there is no association beyond their name in her mouth — is a reminder that in an ever-crowded field, her power has not waned one bit.