While music as an artistic form is well studied, the individuals behind the art receive relatively less attention. In this article, we provide evidence of celebrity advocacy with a systematic examination of musicians’ political engagement on Twitter. This study estimates the extent to which musicians use Twitter for political purposes, with particular attention to whether such engagement varies across music genres. Through a computational-assisted analysis of 2,286,434 tweets, we group 881 musicians into three categories of political engagement on Twitter: not engaged (comprising the majority of artists), circumstantial engagement, and active political engagement. We examine the latter categories in detail with two qualitative case studies. The findings indicate that musicians from different genres have distinct patterns of political engagement. The Christian music genre shows the most engagement as a whole, especially in philanthropy. On the contrary, the most active accounts are rock and hip-hop artists, some of whom discuss political issues and call for mobilization. We conclude with suggestions for future research.

尽管音乐作为一种艺术形式已经得到了很好的研究，但艺术背后的个人却受到的关注相对较少。在本文中，我们通过对音乐家在Twitter上的政治参与的系统检查来提供名人倡导的证据。这项研究估计了音乐家出于政治目的使用Twitter的程度，并特别注意了这种参与是否随音乐流派而变化。通过对2,286,434条Tweet的计算辅助分析，我们将881位音乐家分为Twitter上的三类政治参与：未参与（包括大多数艺术家），环境参与和积极的政治参与。我们通过两个定性案例研究来详细研究后一类。研究结果表明，来自不同流派的音乐家具有不同的政治参与模式。基督教音乐流派表现出整体上的最高参与度，尤其是在慈善事业中。相反，最活跃的帐户是摇滚和嘻哈音乐人，其中一些人讨论政治问题并呼吁动员。最后，我们提出了对未来研究的建议。