HOW ARTISTS ARE USING SOCIAL NETWORKING SITES TO PROMOTE THEIR MUSIC ACROSS THE WORLD.
This blog is Part 2 of our look at Social Media sites and their ability to promote and market artists across the world.
Introduction to Music Streaming Sites
The popularity of sites that allow users to stream, learn, chat and share music with others is growing immensely. While Facebook and the like concentrate on a person’s overall lifestyle, ie work, drinking and partying, Streaming sites focus only on a person’s musical habits. For the general public, such sites may seem less interesting – maybe even boring for some – but for music fans, these sites have the potential to rival the importance of Facebook.
At the end of the day, artists must look to these music fans to build their grass roots following and to further promote their music by accessing these new global virtual music communities. Bottom line, if you want to share and promote your music in the most effective ways possible – get involved in streaming sites.
Last.fm
Lastfm is one of the popular music Streaming sites on the internet and now has over 20 million users across the world. For a list of other similar sites, visit this page. Recently, Lastfm has varied its business model and now requires its users to pay for the services provided on the site (after a free 30 track period). This allows Lastfm to direct some of its revenue to artists who generate lots of plays across the site – more on this royalty scheme later.
Personalised Music Player
An important feature of Lastfm is their intuitive music player which recommends new music to their users based on their musical tastes. This is a great way to introduce your music to fans who are only into your genre. Its much more effective to market your music to audiences who have a history of liking your styles – Why bother promoting your hip hop tracks to death metal fans – the intuitive player does all the hard statistical and stylistic analyses for you and only promotes your music to fans who they think will be interested.
Royalty Program
Lastfm have established a new initiative called the Artist Royalty Program in which they pay artists a small percentage of the revenue an artist’s track generates from the site. Its important to realise that the percentages paid to artists under this program wont be very large at all – but its a start of a new way of thinking for alternative revenue streams for artists. Independent labels, however, may have more luck in earning noticeable income through this program due to the larger pool of tracks from which they can earn from. Stay tuned for a future blog on alternate income streams for the music industry for more information on this.
Blip.fm
Blip is the Twitter for music fans. Blip allows users to listen and share music with others and gives them 150 characters in which to make any comments they like about the music. By providing your music on blip, you allow it to be heard by thousands of would-be music critics and other music fans.
RCRD LBL
This site is a great hub for new music in which independent labels, music bloggers and music fans virtually meet to share, copy and listen to new music. One important aspect of RCRD LBL music is that all music available on the site are under Creative Commons Attribution licences. For more info on what this means, read the Music NSW fact sheet on Creative Commons licences available at (is there a link?). Its therefore important to decide whether sharing and promoting your music across the RCRD LBL networks is more important to you than earning money from not sharing over this site.
BLOGS
Another invention of the social media age is the blog. Blogs are now a part of every day life, and often, they stream music and videos whilst recommending and critiquing music trends both locally and globally. It’s a bit like a zine, but with more functionality, more regularity, and less lo fi. Bloggers are generally seen as trendsetters and are often the first point at which hype will orbit an artist.If the blogger ends up liking your music, they may actively promote you over their blog (where the audience is limitless).
Another recent innovation in the world of blogs is what we term Blog Aggregation Sites where bloggers contribute their blogs on a specific topic over one website. These Blog Aggregation Sites end up pooling each bloggers ‘fan base’ to form one very popular blog site. By interacting and sharing your music over such sites, you may be able to promote your music to new and untouched networks.
BLOG AGGREGATORS
The Hype Machine
Elbo.ws
AUSTRALIAN MUSIC BLOGS
Whothehell.net
Rose Quartz
