Madison Beer is continuing to open up about her journey as a pop star — and all the lessons she's learned along the way.
Beer launched to fame when she was just barely in her teens thanks to YouTube; she was discovered by Justin Bieber, who has dealt with his own struggles with fame, and signed to Scooter Braun's label shortly thereafter. She has experienced her fair share of ups and downs since those early days, and in a new interview with Elle, she says she was “mistreated” during that time. “I don’t think my story would happen, in the sense of how I was mistreated. But in 2012, things were different,” she told the outlet. “I didn’t feel protected, and I didn’t feel like people approached judging me like they were judging a 14-year-old.”
According to Beer, catapulting into major stardom in an instant forced her to “grow up really fast,” and it “messed [her] up in a lot of ways," though she says she thinks she has “hopefully recovered a bit." Not only was she navigating this fresh fame and tons of attention online, both positive and negative, she also got dropped from her label just a few years later at age 16 and dealt with some major mental health struggles. “I was always being tried as an adult,” Beer says now. “I was trying to navigate how to be a person, and I’d have the whole internet to report to.”
Beer told Elle that after being signed to a label, she moved her “entire life” from Long Island to Los Angeles. “I had no friends, I was getting homeschooled. When I was dropped, I felt like these people that had sat me down and were like, ‘We’re family, and we love you, and we are going to take care of you forever,’ suddenly couldn’t give less of a sh*t about me.”
The musician reflected on similar themes and experiences in a 2024 interview with Teen Vogue, examining how those situations changed her personality and shifted the way she saw the world.
"I was very, I would say maybe spiteful, and I harbored a lot of animosity for many people around me," Madison Beer told Teen Vogue last year at a JBL event. “I think I was born a gentle, kind, and loving person, and I felt like I got poisoned through the years. And then it turned into this anger like, 'How dare people change me and make me jaded and make my open heart cold?' And then I realized, 'You know what? After everything, after getting bullied and tormented online and years of this and that and whatever, no one can really take away my heart being soft and open to people.'”
Despite these setbacks, Beer says she still thinks getting discovered online is a possibility for young, hopeful, talented people. “TikTok and [social media] have given so many people an opportunity to go viral without needing the music industry," she told Elle. Today, the 26-year-old Beer feels much more confident as a person and an artist — which you can see and feel in her recent hits, like 2024's “Make You Mine.” She's at work on her next album, the follow-up to Silence Between Songs, which she describes as being partly inspired by video games, with lots of “really interesting noises.”
“I’m really proud of where I am," she said. "If my younger self met me right now, she’d be like, ‘You’re the coolest girl on earth. I get to be you one day? That’s so sick.’”
