Zachary
Lansing
SpTp:
Digital Literacies
Argumentative
Piece
9/26/2013
Social Media's Impact on the Music Industry and How It Helps the Record Labels
The music industry is changing as
social media platforms such as YouTube, Twitter, and Spotify cradle it through major
record label crises, such as the extensive file sharing of music over the
internet. The breakthrough of these platforms has made the promotion of artists
and concerts as easy as sending a tweet or releasing a new music video on the
artist’s official YouTube page. With these breakthroughs in the music industry,
the record labels benefit from the ever-conductive music scene in social media.
It has never been easier for listeners to find music that they love, and
promotion has never been easier since the arrival of these social media
outlets.
YouTube is responsible for being one
of the biggest promoters of artists. To put the dominance of music on YouTube
in perspective, eight of the ten most viewed videos on YouTube are music
videos. Six of those videos are controlled by Vevo, a music video website that
extensively pushes music videos through the various YouTube channels that are
controlled by Vevo. Vevo has ties with artists such as Justin Bieber, Lady
Gaga, Katy Perry, and several other mainstream artists. But it’s not only in
promotion where Vevo helps the record labels, Vevo also brings revenue to
record labels as they have deals with labels such as Sony Music Entertainment
and the Universal Music Group, and Vevo shares the profit it gets from YouTube
video views with the labels.
Watching YouTube videos may be free
to the public, but it still offers the record companies and artists some
revenue with YouTube’s ad system that helps distribute revenue to channels.
This is much different than illegally sharing music files through open torrents
for there is some profit on the end of the record companies.
Ads are one way that listening to
music can be free, while record companies can still gain from it. Spotify is
another music service that is completely free to the listeners that has adopted
this system. But Spotify takes it one step further by giving the listener the
option of purchasing a five dollar monthly subscription to Spotify to rid the
listener of the ads, and a ten dollar monthly subscription to share it through
all of your listening platforms(such as your tablet, phone, laptop, etc.), all
ad-free. At the same time, Spotify pushes new songs onto your playlist and
introduces listeners to new artists and essentially helps the promotion of
these artists, saving those involved with promotion a lot of money in the
process.
Promotion has always been a big part
of the music business. When an artist drops a new album, it is best to promote
that album to ensure listeners know of the new album being recorded for the
best results in revenue. Before the age of social media, this was done through
means of television ads(which were mostly exclusively music channels), radio
ads, and in some cases billboards. All of these styles of promotion were costly
and lengthy creative processes to pull the customers in. But with social media
came the ability to push information directly to the fans. This is both
efficient and cost-effective.
The one social media outlet that
could be cited as the biggest promoter of music could possibly be Twitter,
where artists could tweet out to their fans when a new album would drop.
Artists would even retweet other artists to even further promotion of an artist’s
album. Just a few lines of text and potentially millions of fans could be
informed of a new list of songs coming out from one of their favorite artists,
simple yet effective.
This promotion is especially
effective for the record companies for they tend to keep most of the profit
that is made from the albums and songs sold.
Sources:
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