Marketing Music on Social Media Sites
Social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and others have grown exponentially over the past few years. One of the entertainment genres that has benefited mightily from social media is music, rap, rock, hip-hop, country, and even classical music. This paper explores and analyzes how musicians and groups have exploited social media in their marketing strategies.
Key Reasons Music Marketing Thrives on Social Media
Social Media has carved out an enormous presence in the contemporary entertainment and information scene in the United States. In fact according to a 2010 book -- Facebook Marketing: An Hour a Day -- a Harris Interactive study shows that "…48% of all American adults had either a Facebook or a MySpace account" (Treadaway, et al., 2010, p. 15). Also, as an indication of how extraordinarily fast Facebook has grown, in just eight months the giant social media company went from 100 million users to 200 million users, Treadaway writes. In contrast to that astronomical growth, it took the United States fifty-two years to go from 100 million to 200 million inhabitants, Treadaway goes on (15).
More importantly, Facebook users spend 13.9 "billion minutes" on the site in April of 2009, which was a significant jump from the 1.7 billion minutes in April of the previous year, Treadaway explains. Putting aside the technical data based on time, Facebook reaches an estimated 29.9% of all users of the Internet worldwide. And the astonishingly rapid rise of Facebook has "coincided with a decline in consumer use of traditional media" including television, newspapers, magazines and other more established media.
So, with a vast international audience of online users, it seems an ideal way to market entertainment -- in particular, music in all its forms and styles. This kind of marketing, according to Treadaway, represents a dramatic shift away from "push marketing" -- through which companies reached out directly to have conversations with customers through radio, billboards, television commercials and print advertising -- and into a kind of marketing where "our friends and colleagues" that have left opinions (and blogs) about products and services on Facebook are more trustworthy than traditional advertising. "Online retailers realized that they could increase sales by allowing visitors to their site to offer personal recommendations about products they were selling," Treadaway explains on page 15. Those "products" that Facebook users comment on are often new music albums and songs.
MySpace Rebounds With Music Marketing
The new owners of MySpace, which once was the unquestioned premier social media site but has fallen on hard times -- due in large part to the booming popularity of Facebook -- are going to re-launch MySpace as "…almost exclusively a music service," according to CMU, a music Website in the UK. The new MySpace owner is Specific Media, and its CEO is Tim Vanderhook, who says that "independent bands would be "a key target" for the new launch of MySpace. The previous owner, News Corp (Fox News), had overlooked the promotion of bands and music, according to Vanderhook; hence, many of those musical groups took their marketing needs to Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites (CMU, 2011, p. 1).
And how will Vanderhook push MySpace back up to near where it was a few years ago? He seems "…keen to push the major label licensed streaming music service hidden away under the MySpace Music banner… [and he says] he can make ad-funded streaming music work" (CMU, p. 1). Vanderhook also says he has the rights to a catalogue of 25,000 independent artists and 42 million songs, which, if true, is impressive and shows that this social media site is serious about marketing music. What MySpace also has is an important and high-visibility artist, Justin Timberlake, to draw attention and media to the revamped site. "Justin is going to be the creative force behind MySpace and will help us drive the strategy of what the tools need to be for artists and what the [MySpace] community should look like" (CMY, p. 1).
Coldplay & Lady Gaga Understand YouTube & Facebook Marketing
Could there possibly be a better way to use social media for marketing one's music then letting fans enjoy a live concert performance? The answer is rhetorical, but the point is made. Indeed, not many artists or groups have launched a new album by streaming a concert live and free on the Internet, but the popular group Coldplay will be doing that October 26 from Madrid, Spain (Associated Press, 2011). Two days after...
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