Final Essay Draft

Introduction

As a teenager, my life focuses a lot around technology. This includes social media, which is a largely influential thing in everyone’s lives, especially in the music industry. 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 if it has aided artists in their careers or if it was just their record label and how they have become famous or more well known due to the trends online. I intend to use mainly online sources such as articles and also wish to use 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. I aim to explore various case studies relating to different platforms to see how both artists and listeners are affected by posts online.

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? 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). This feature was, 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. One of the most famous Myspace acts is Arctic Monkeys. These were 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 messageboards… 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). 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 live stream and release demos (Snapes, 2015), their popularity soared and like Arctic Monkeys, they were put on the map as musicians (Irizarry,2019).

How the internet continues 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 to 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 percent of Facebook page likes, however, they also found that 80% only receive up to 1 Facebook like daily, which just shows how much the platform’s popularity is decreasing (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. Instagram gives the opportunity to share in many ways such as by using stories and IGTV to share videos of music and link to music platforms. This is all visual-based so appearances matter. However, Twitter is more focused on writing interesting and informative posts and Facebook’s popularity is continually decreasing.

Snapchat’s introduction to the music industry

Snapchat is a social media based on sharing photos and videos for a limited time but how does that allow it to become involved in the music industry? There are a few ways in which it does so. First of all, the stories feature allows artists to share short videos about what they are up to. For example, playing a riff or touring the studio to generate excitement from their fans. Secondly, filters created by artists can be used to promote new music by playing a snippet of their song and providing a link for the user to listen to it. They can also create Bitmoji filters. These are cartoon characters who represent yourself. A famous example of this is Ed Sheeran’s ‘Perfect’ serenade in December 2017 to promote the release of his newest album (at the time) Divide (Ed Sheeran’s ‘Perfect’ Snapchat Filter: See How It Works | Billboard, 2017).

Youtube Music and it’s 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 out 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). That is an amazing amount of reach and can even lead to people becoming recognised. In fact, 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 earned 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). However, not everyone thinks that the platform is amazing. In fact, 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) in order to protect their music and ultimately their careers as Youtube is making money off of their material without them getting a cut so to speak.

The ‘for you’ age, Tik Tok’s take over

Tik Tok, formerly known as music.ly, is the newest social media platform. It has a specific kind of algorithm which dictates what goes onto it’s ‘for you’ page. The videos on here are likely the ones that go viral and become trends. This gives it a key role in the music industry at present. It has the ability to 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 Tik Tok’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 make a decision 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. Just like this song grew in popularity as do so many other things both music-related and otherwise.

Conclusion

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.

Bibliography
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