Our pop stars are burning out. Ariana Grande, after a hellish year marked by a cancelled engagement, a terror attack and the death of an ex-boyfriend, has hit back at fans angry over the delay to her latest music video: “Been thru hell and back and i’m doing my best to keep going”. Selena Gomez, currently receiving mental health treatment, posted on Instagram: “I am taking a social media break. Again.” Even Rihanna, widely perceived as impervious to industry pressures, became short with an interviewer last month when asked, yet again, when she plans on releasing new music. “Who sent you?” she replied.

Why now? The pop industry has never been particularly kind to its artists. Derided as the most commercial (and therefore least serious) music genre, its stars are often regarded less as human beings, more as vessels for bangers. The factory-line churn of having to release an album every two years, with a promotional cycle followed by a world tour – all while maintaining a pleasant, marketable and “always on” public persona – has always been a pressure.

Take Britney Spears’ breakdown in 2007, when she shaved her head and attacked a paparazzo’s car with an umbrella: a test case for how the media used to treat a stressed pop idol. Musicians had always “behaved badly”, but for Britney, international pop sensation, this behaviour seemed like a terrible bug in the machine. While bad boys could be bad ­­­ ­­ – that was their brand, after all – the mental breakdown of a picture-perfect young idol was a blatant deviation from the standard script of pop marketability, so reliant on the image of an emotionally uncomplicated and sexually available ingenue. Spears’ erratic behaviour was treated as round-the-clock light entertainment by tabloids, setting a darker precedent: a pop star’s entire personal life is a public commodity.

Britney Spears in 2008. Photograph: Gabriel Bouys/AFP/Getty Images

Stars now have tools to fight back, however. Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat and Tumblr have become an integral part of the celebrity machine, connecting young, always-online music fans with their favourite stars, bypassing the publicist’s approval. While, to their famous users, social media offer a way out of the well-oiled respectability machine.

It’s no coincidence that Ariana Grande and Selena Gomez’s breaks from public life were announced on their social media channels. They are seasoned veterans of the game. In the lead up to her latest album Sweetener, Grande was criticised for not being fully committed to the promotional cycle, with fans noting her absence from the usual roster of American talk shows. Facing mounting criticism, she tweeted that album promotion “destroyed my mental health and was horrible for me”, asking her fans to “stop coming for me and my team when I’ve never been better literally in any department.”

Selena Gomez, hot off a major cover story with Elle magazine, voiced her displeasure with the journalist who wrote it on her Instagram, saying: “The older I get the more I want my voice to be mine.” She then hosted a 45-minute Instagram Live stream, in which she discussed her experience of depression, not being mentally ready for touring, and how fame decreases the “pleasure centres” in the brain. “I don’t feel like being on another magazine cover ever again”, she says in the unglamorous, DIY-style video; “It just … it doesn’t matter.”

can i pls have one okay day. just one. pls. — Ariana Grande (@ArianaGrande) September 27, 2018

Justin Bieber’s Instagram, meanwhile, is a mishmash of millennial-humour memes and deeply earnest posts, all capitalised: “THAT GLAMOROUS LIFESTYLE YOU SEE PORTRAYED BY FAMOUS PEOPLE IN INSTAGRAM DON’T BE FOOLED THINKING THEIR LIFE IS BETTER THAN YOURS I CAN PROMISE ITS NOT!”, one post exhorts. He cancelled meet-and-greets with his fans in 2016, announcing on Instagram that while he “want[s] to make people smile and happy”, these events have him “feeling mentally and emotionally exhausted to the point of depression”.

While these posts may be a publicist’s nightmare – and irritate the casual observer, familiar with the immense wealth and privilege that comes with this level of celebrity – they strengthen the resolve of the audience that matters most: fans. They flood these posts with uplifting support. “We love u so so much, your happiness is the most important thing to us,” says an Ariana fan in a widely liked comment, responding to her decision to slow down her promotional cycle.

“Protecting” your celebrity against public pressures is common among young fans. This curious impulse – perhaps kicked off by Chris Crocker’s exhortation to “Leave Britney alone!” in the wake of her breakdown – blends conventional celebrity fandom with awareness of the corrupting effects of fame. These well-meaning fans’ vociferous concern nevertheless adds to the cacophonous, stressful noise of fame. For pop stars who can endure it, though, this is a game changer. Failure to “work”, rather than being a career killer, has become a unique selling point: disclosing your own struggles in public, and an inability to live up to the fame game, only strengthens your appeal.

It would be wrong to suggest that these young stars are fully in control of their lives. In every Instagram post or tweet that pushes back against commercial pressures, there is a naked, vulnerable plea for identification. The spectre of Britney’s breakdown lives on.

But it is a start. Pop has always been an industry full of contradictions. It touts the public iconography of young women while being controlled behind the scenes by older men; it courts X-rated sexiness while remaining conventionally marketable; it emphasises the difference of its artists while pushing them through factory-line production processes. Now, pop is faced with its biggest contradiction yet: the sheer strength of artists’ star power has almost made the media machine behind it irrelevant. Pop stars have long been beholden to their public image, imposed on them from above; now, with their social media accounts and steadfast support of their ride-or-die fans, they’re beginning to write their own scripts.