When Madison Beer was 12 years old, she was sold a dream that turned out to be a nightmare. In her recent Cosmopolitan cover story, the 26-year-old recalled the whirlwind of being signed to Island Records at such a young age, with industry executives in her ear telling her, “We all love you; you’re going to be the female Justin Bieber, give it a year.” When Beer wasn’t able to immediately replicate the success of one of the biggest stars in pop history, the switch was flipped. At 16, she was dropped by her label, lawyer, and her then-manager, Scooter Braun.
“Everything in my life went away within 12 hours,” Beer said. The logic behind the Bieber comparison was tenuous at best. “The reason it was a thing was because Scooter had signed me, and obviously Scooter had signed Justin,” she said. “Justin had posted a cover, and I had posted a cover, so it felt synchronized. But Justin was also only a teenager when I got signed — he hadn’t even experienced his adult life yet. He’s been through so much, too.”
Beer is still close with Bieber and his wife, Hailey. “I love him and Hailey very much. I was with them recently and we were like, ‘How special that we’ve known each other for so long,’” she said. “I’ve known Hailey since I was 10, and I’ve known Justin since I was 12. We’re still in each other’s lives and now they’re married with a baby.”
One thing they did ultimately have in common was the loss of crucial developmental years to an industry that didn’t have their best interests at heart. “My label was like, ‘Good luck.’ And I’m like, ‘You guys just stole years of my childhood that I’ll never get back. And now it’s just ‘good luck’ and ‘have fun’?” Beer said. “I can’t go to college because I’ve been homeschooled. I have a high school degree and nothing else because of my career. My whole family uprooted and moved to Los Angeles with no connections. I have no friends. Are you guys kidding me?”
There was a loss of innocence associated with the experience, too, one that was unique to Beer as a young girl being positioned as a parallel to a male teen heartthrob. “I hadn’t been successful enough. There was a conversation around me when I was 14,” she said, “I remember people being like, ‘She’s too sexy’ and ‘We can’t sell the sex because she’s so young, so we’d have to wait.’ This was a real conversation, grown men talking about how I was too sexy. I was 14.”
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The same team that dropped her, she continued, were once “these people that I thought really loved me,” and ultimately became people she never spoke to again. “I felt like I was a dollar sign to them, and when I didn’t bring in enough money, they didn’t care about me anymore,” she said. “Maybe they shouldn’t have signed a 12-year-old without thinking of the consequences of what that was going to do.”
Beer has bounced back as much as she could. Her second studio album, Silence Between Songs, arrived in 2023 on Epic Records and earned her a Grammy Award nomination for Best Dance Pop Recording for her single “Make You Mine.” A 63-date headlining tour followed in 2024. “It feels even crazier now because when I have 12-year-old girls come to my meet-and-greets, I’m like, ‘You’re a baby. There’s no way that I was a signed artist at your age,’” Beer said. “It’s terrifying. No, it’s sickening. The lack of caring about my childhood was so disturbing. I was like, ‘Wow, y’all really don’t give a fuck.’”
