Celebrity, Inc. cover art

Celebrity, Inc.

How Famous People Make Money

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Celebrity, Inc.

By: Jo Piazza
Narrated by: Jean Barrett
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About this listen

From $10,000 tweets to making money in the afterlife, a recovering gossip columnist explores the business lessons that power the Hollywood Industrial Complex.

Why do celebrities get paid so much more than regular people to do a job that seems to afford them the same amount of leisure time as most retirees? What do Bush-era economics have to do with the rise of Kim Kardashian? How do the laws of supply and demand explain why the stars of Teen Mom are on the cover of Us Weekly? And how was the sale of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie's baby pictures a little like a street drug deal?

After a decade spent toiling as an entertainment journalist and gossip columnist, Jo Piazza asks the hard questions about the business behind celebrity. Make no mistake: celebrity is an industry. Never in the course of human history has the market for celebrities been as saturated as it is today. Nearly every day most Americans will consume something a celebrity is selling - a fragrance, a sneaker, a song, a movie, a show, a tweet, or a photo in a magazine.

With the benefits of Piazza's unique access to the celebrity market, Celebrity, Inc. explains in detail what generates cash for the industry and what drains value faster than a starlet downs champagne in 12 fascinating case studies that tackle celebrities the way industry analysts would dissect any consumer brand.

©2011 Jo Piazza (P)2011 Audible, Inc.
Economics Marketing Marketing & Sales Social Sciences Celebrity Money Business Entertainment

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Critic reviews

"An economist at heart, Jo Piazza has consistently dug deeper to try to figure out why celebrities behave the way they do and what the consequences of their behavior will be. This book puts celebrities in context, but it also puts the consumer of celebrity in context. No one should feel bad about enjoying pop culture, but they should understand how it is being marketed to them. [Celebrity, Inc.] gives the reader the tools to do exactly that." (Bonnie Fuller, President of HollywoodLife.com)
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Most relevant
I got to the end of "Chapter 2", which means I made it all of 18 minutes into this book.

I'm interested in the topic, but the narrator is just awful. She's one of those cheery newscaster types who only knows about three ways to say a sentence. It doesn't matter what the content is, she's going to say it the same way. I'm sure you know the type if you've listened to many audiobooks. Sometimes, the words she was emphasizing in a sentence made it clear that she didn't understand what she was reading. And this is not exactly an academic text.

Just awful. Returned, unfortunately. I'll get the ebook.

Couldn't get past the awful narration

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