As a teenager, my life focuses a lot around technology. This includes social media, which is an influential thing in many people’s lives. Throughout this research project, I wanted to explore exactly just how much of an influence social media has on the music industry. Specifically, I am interested to find out how social media has aided artists in their careers. I intend to use mainly online sources such as articles and videos to assist me in finding this out. It would also be a good idea to use any statistics or interviews with artists when they talk about how their popularity increased due to social media. These sources will be compared with others to ensure I am not biased.
How Myspace helped artists in their rise to fame
Myspace was one of the first-ever social media platforms. It was founded in 2003, becoming the largest social networking site in the world between 2005 and 2008. Between those years, in 2006, it even became the most popular site in the US surpassing Google(Frymorgen, 2017). But why was it so popular with musicians? It was due to it’s exciting and unique features such as having the ability to “select a song that would automatically play on your profile and embedding content from… YouTube” (Frymorgen, 2017). These features were, of course, popular with new musicians such as the Sean Kingston, Panic! At The Disco and Calvin Harris (Corner, 2015) as it allowed them to showcase their music to the world for free, both on their profile and in the music player much like YouTube. One of the most famous Myspace acts is Arctic Monkeys. A band from Sheffield, who gigged in local pubs and distributed their homemade demo CD’s at these shows. They also began to use filesharing sites and created a Myspace account (Snapes, 2015). Snapes states that “By the time the press latched on in spring 2005, fans were already swapping bootlegs and gossip on Monkeys message boards… they signed with indie label Domino that June” and they also performed at Reading Festival in August to what former NME editor Conor McNicholas claims to be “an instant fanbase” (Snapes, 2015). That instant fanbase had been created on Myspace making the website an effective popularity booster. Their experience is not different from that of many other Myspace acts, but they were the ones who created the model so well known today. As acts such as Lily Allen began to use Myspace to release demos (Snapes, 2015), their popularity soared and like Arctic Monkeys, they were put on the map as musicians (Irizarry,2019).
Is the internet continuing to aid artists with their growth?
Social networking has been an aid to musicians since Myspace in 2005 but since then, it has come a long way. In a recent study by MusicWatch (Glanz, 2018), It was discovered that 90% of social media users engage with musicians online. This includes Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. Snapchat is mostly used to share, and view videos taken from live shows by audience members (68%), Instagram users often follow, share and tag musicians (56%) and Twitter users also follow and keep up to date with artists (51%). Finally, a mere 44% of Facebook users like the pages of various musicians (Glanz, 2018). Similarly, these statistics are the percentage in which artists are recognised online based on their popularity. Next Big Sound found that in 2013 a whopping 90.7% of artists online are undiscovered yet mainstream artists (1.1%) make up 87.3 per cent of Facebook page likes. This shows that independent artists are struggling to use social media effectively unlike during the Myspace era. This could mean that it is becoming less effective in aiding artists that don’t already have a following. (Ulloa,2014). They also found that different artist’s streams and following are going up in the billions every year (Benatar,2014). As is made clear by these statistics, it is important to have a following on social platforms to both promote your music and to inform your fans about your career but it will not help you to solely use it especially as a new artist.
YouTube Music and its war with the music industry
YouTube is an extremely well-known platform and had been since its start in 2005. Everyone knows that if you want to find a video about something, it is probably on YouTube and the best part? It’s free. This makes it the perfect platform for people who are just starting as musicians and want to share their work with the world. The best part about this is that not only is it free to upload but on average 30 million people use YouTube per day (37 Mind Blowing YouTube Facts, Figures and Statistics – 2020 – MerchDope, 2020). According to IFPI’s 2017 music consumer insight report, 46% of all music streaming is from YouTube alone (CONNECTING WITH MUSIC MUSIC CONSUMER INSIGHT REPORT, 2017). That is an amazing amount of streams and can even lead to people getting recognised. 5 Seconds of Summer is a very famous example of this. Their acoustic video cover of Chris Brown and Justin Bieber’s “Next 2 You,” has gained 1.1 million YouTube views since being posted in July 2011 and from there, their career took off (5 Seconds of Summer: 10 Things You Need to Know, 2014). They now have 6 albums and millions of followers online. However, not everyone thinks that the platform is amazing. Many artists are very unhappy with the streaming services. This is because every single day, it allows hundreds of millions of copyrighted music, music videos and live shows to be posted without the permission of the artists. It led to the likes of Taylor Swift, Paul McCartney, Kings of Leon and Deadmau5 among others who signed a letter to congress to have copyright laws changed (Knopper, 2016) to protect their music and ultimately their careers as YouTube is making money off of their material without them getting a percentage of the profits. This is ultimately damaging the careers of many because
The ‘for you’ age, TikTok’s take over
TikTok, formerly known as music.ly, is one of the newest social media platforms. It has a specific kind of algorithm which dictates what goes onto a users ‘for you’ page. The videos on here are often the ones that go viral and become trends. This gives it a key role in the music industry at present. It can make lesser-known music go viral based on trends. One example of this is ‘I Miss Having Sex But At Least I Don’t Wanna Die Anymore’ by Waterparks. After the release of their latest album FANDOM, this song was added to TikTok’s ‘sounds’ tab. After the label had informed the band, it became their third most streamed song on Spotify and then after one day it was at the top (Knight and Sang, 2019) despite it never being “pushed as a single” (Knight, 2020). Awsten Knight, who is the frontman of Waterparks says that his band’s old label created a Twitter Poll about ‘which Waterparks song should have a music video’. This was, of course, frustrating as their previous record label (Equal Vision) was letting Twitter users make decisions about their music (Knight and Sang, 2019). This was not very helpful to them as it denied them control over their music and career. Now, however, the band have more creative control and it is only the fans that truly decide on what is the single. Awsten says that he hears that “you put it on whatever and see which one pops off the most and then that’s the single.” (Knight and Sang, 2019). He feels this is “weird” but in the present day, most things are dictated by likes and shares on social media. So did social media help them further their musical career? Yes. Continually posting that everyone should ‘stream FANDOM’ and having those posts shared helped all of their shows to sell out (Knight, 2020). Just like this song grew in popularity as do so many other things both music-related and otherwise.
Social media is relative to popularity. No matter the time, it will always be about followers and likes that make you and your music popular. So how much of an influence does social media really on the music industry and does it largely affect the careers of musicians? From the beginning, social media has indeed helped many to improve their popularity by using it to showcase your work and tease at new releases it is the perfect method of promotion. What about record labels? Well, they also make use of it but often to the dismay of artists. So, in conclusion, yes social media is extremely vital in the music industry.
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