It is significant that Rihanna released her first single within three months of YouTube being invented (her fans are a generation for whom music videos, rather than just songs, are the go-to pop art form), and in the year that MySpace surpassed Google as the US’s most visited website. Photograph: then, she is the quintessential modern pop entity. Far from just creating events, it feels as if Rihanna herself is the event.

That social media post went viral because of the headphones as much as the confirmation that her album was finished.

Nor will she have been surprised by the avalanche of thinkpieces surrounding last year’s Bitch Better Have My Money video, and she knew exactly what she was doing with Monday’s selfie in which she wore a $9,000 pair of Dolce & Gabbana headphones, captioned “listening to Anti”. She knows, for instance, that if she goes on holiday and, while wearing a bikini, bottlefeeds a miniature monkey on a public beach, pictures are likely to surface. Like other artists who have appeared in the digital era – Gaga, Katy Perry and Taylor Swift – Rihanna makes everything an event. One of the joys of Rihanna-watching is that, no matter how premeditated certain aspects of her career might be, there is an impulsive, gleeful side that suggests she is actually quite enjoying herself. The music is only half the story, though, because during the past decade, the fame Rihanna enjoyed has shifted, and mushroomed, in both intensity and form. And there were collaborations, too, with Coldplay, Drake, Eminem, Nicki Minaj and Kanye West. But Rihanna’s hits continued to be enormous – 2011’s We Found Love was the second-biggest of her career. This release strategy is most commonly associated, in the modern age at least, with a pop artist terrified of transient fanbases. But she kept her foot down – in 2011 alone, she had 11 UK hits – and drove her career into the current era where greatest hits albums don’t even exist. Living her career on fast-forward meant that, within four years, Rihanna had sailed past the point where most artists would have released a greatest hits.

Rihanna greatest hits mega