After a false start at 13, pop sensation Madison Beer is relaunching herself at 19 with a new EP and a strong message for her millions of online fans, she tells David Smyth

It’s obvious why Madison Beer has picked her particular life goal: “I always said that I want to sell out Madison Square Garden before I turn 21,” she tells me. If only the 19-year-old New Yorker had been christened “Islington” she could have ticked off a more manageable namesake gig this weekend, when she arrives at the north London Academy venue on her first tour.

America’s premier arena might not be beyond her reach, however, if her ludicrous Internet numbers are anything to go by: 2.6 million followers on Twitter, 10.7 million on Instagram (significantly more than the biggest new female singer in the UK, Dua Lipa) and 57.3 million Spotify streams for her biggest song to date, Dead.

Beer doesn’t see it as simply as that: “Some people think, ‘She has 10 million followers, of course she could sell out Madison Square Garden’. But they don’t realise it’s a hard thing to translate followers scrolling in their beds on Instagram to people who’ll get up, buy a ticket, get ready and go out. You really have to love somebody.”

She seems to have mixed feelings about her social media success. I catch the second concert of her life, in the Berlin club venue Bi Nuu, and her fans, mostly teenage and female, are clearly major phone enthusiasts.

A forest of screens goes up to obscure the view the moment she arrives on stage. She grabs a phone from someone in the front row to take some snaps. But during a cover of Radiohead’s Creep she asks them all to put their devices away — perhaps to make sure Radiohead never hear it — and just be in the moment. “I feel like you guys get to look at me on your phones all the time so it’s special that I get to see you in person,” she tells them.

Backstage, immediately after the show, she says to her assistant: “Hey, I know you’re busy right now but will you try and just go through as many photos as you can — I wanna get something up on Instagram like ASAP.”

“I’m never on my phone really,” she says. “It’s here with me but look, it’s on 100 per cent power, I have no texts. It bores me. I try not to think about social media too much. I don’t want to post something just to post it. I’ll go a day without posting anything, but if I go a week, I’ll think my followers are probably worried so I’ll post something just to let them know I’m alive.”

What kind of posts tend to become the most popular? “Just photos of myself, or anything funny, or things saying like, ‘racism is bad’ — those kinds of things go viral. I don’t really care. If it gets 400 retweets I’m happy, and if it gets 40,000 I’m happy.” What if it gets one or two, like mine tend to? “It doesn’t really bother me.”

The visual world of Instagram is a habitat that suits her. She’s so physically flawless that even up close she resembles a CGI rendering of a pop star. I have to stop myself from asking if her eyebrows are real. She has done a bit of catwalk modelling for D&G and Maybelline and sang on the same bill as Liam Gallagher at a Vogue party during Milan Fashion Week.