For music artists, applause fuels both ambition and anxiety

Even as musicians gain the audience they crave, they must navigate the fragility that comes with waiting for applause

- Divya Naik

To navigate fame, artists should work to ground self-worth not only in applause but also in personal growth.

(ISTOCKPHOTO)

On a rainy evening in Mumbai, singer-songwriter Rohit Shetty, 27, sat scrolling through the comments on his latest music video.

Two million views in a week was a milestone he had long dreamt of. Yet his eyes lingered on a single line buried among the praise: “Derivative. Sounds like he’s copying Prateek Kuhad.”

That one sentence undid weeks of joy. “I couldn’t sleep for days,” Shetty says. “I stopped writing. I felt like a fraud.” To numb the unease, he turned to alcohol, spinning between bursts of inspiration and crushing self-doubt.

Shetty's experience is far from unusual. While artists often chase visibility and acclaim, the very spotlight they seek can become corrosive—fuelling anxiety, eroding self-worth, and even reshaping their creative drive. Netflix’s 2024 documentary Yo Yo Honey Singh: Famous touched on the pressures of celebrity, but stopped short of exploring a deeper terrain: how recognition, even in small doses, rewires the artistic psyche.

Psychologists often describe this as the “fragile ego”, which is a volatile mix of vulnerability, validation-seeking, and identity collapse that can spark brilliance but also sow despair.

Not all experts are comfortable with the term. Pratistha Trivedi Mirza, senior clinical psychologist at Amaha Health, a mental health organisation based in Mumbai, argues that “fragile ego” oversimplifies a complex reality. Creative work makes identity porous: who an artist is and what they make become tightly fused. As a result, even professional setbacks are experienced as personal failures.