The importance of social media in music marketing
 | Social media has exploded over the last few years, with Facebook
claiming 800 million monthly users and Twitter over 465 million
accounts. It’s no wonder that the music industry has taken to social
media to promote their acts.
music industry There has been a love/hate relationship between the Internet and the music industry ever since the invention of Napster and CD sales have slumped heavily in recent years. But the industry has been too heavily focused at old-fashioned music marketing standards, which involve spending large amounts of money on radio and print promotion and interruption advertising. These outlets have become less and less important as technology creates new ways for fans to discover music. Savvy music marketing companies have realized that they can reach a highly targeted audience for a fraction of the costs by utilizing social media. The big problem that acts face now is that the level of entry has been lowered and to stand out amongst the noise is a lot harder today then it was 20 years ago. Social Media is overrun but wannabe acts that constantly push sub-par music on the general public. This in turn discourages potential fans from giving new acts a chance and makes it harder for great music to rise to the top. There have always been tastemakers who have driven trends in music and we are no facing a time where those tastemakers have far less impact. So how do the music buying public know what music they should be listening to and what is just noise? For the most part they don’t. I believe that the music industry will go revert somewhat in a few years and tastemakers will become more important. It won’t be the radio DJ, like in days gone by, but possibly the festival promoter or bloggers. Streaming sites like Spotify have adapted to allow people make and share playlists and over time certain playlists will stand out. But there will be very little money in discovering and sharing new music via this method and only a few will stick with it. Until then social media is one of the best ways of reaching a targeted audience, but acts and their promotional team need to work hard to utilize it to its potential. They need to think niche and focus on building a small core fan base. Growing it year-by-year, release-by-release. It’s easy to look at the figures and think, “If I reach 1%, I’ll have an audience of 8 million” but they need to be looking at much smaller, targeted figures. Promote to their niche genre and demographic and if their music is great, really great, then they will reach mainstream success. If you liked this article then you should join my music-marketing page on Facebook, where I post articles to help musicians better understand music marketing. http://www.facebook.com/plastichallwaymusic music marketing |
