We have all spoken about the negative aspects of social media on culture – the narcissistic element integral to MySpace and Facebook; the violence that seems to be endemic on video hosting sites; and the potential risks associated with living a cyber life. But do social media also have the potential to help stimulate cultural growth?
In her article, Different folk for different folks, Rupa Huq describes how Web 2.0 has opened the door to a variety of different musical styles. This is primarily thanks to MySpace and YouTube, but with Last FM gaining popularity everyday I am sure that it too will play a part in the future.
“Culturally, the world looks very different since the development of Web2.0′s general democracy of participation and criticism, and more specifically through MySpace and YouTube’s democracy of performance and production.”
Rupa Huq, Guardian, 26.12.2008
But is the web really a democratic space in which to publicise your band?
In his book, The Long Tail, Chris Anderson predicted that online music would be a way of levelling the playing field in the music industry. “The theory for online music was that a lot more artists would make money out of their music – just not as much money as the few made before.” However, it would seem the opposite is true.
“Numerous blogs and blog comments have hailed the internet as the slayer of domineering record labels. Now the “hated” A&R men and women (hated by a lot of unsigned bands, at least) would become obsolete because music fans and artists could bypass traditional ways of connecting with each other. But if the music industry is so screwed, why do young artists keep signing to labels, and major labels at that? Why aren’t they all using sites such as Jamendo or self-releasing? Why, when the audience has the choice of tens of millions of tracks, do they still gravitate so heavily towards musicians signed to – mostly major – labels?”
Helienne Lindvall, Guardian, 09.01.2009
When I signed up for last FM I had a look at the tracks which they considered “The Best of 2008″ – I missed a lot of ’08 because I was travelling and wanted to see if I had missed any huge releases whilst I was away. The result wasn’t inspiring. The top 10 most listened tracks were entirely Coldplay dominated – it was as if no other album had been released all year. But why, when you can listen to music for free on the Last FM site, was there no deviations from the norm? Surely the whole point of such a site is to introduce social media users to new artists, to wider their musical scope and by doing so open the industry doors to a new generation of talented musicians?
Over the years a number of high profile stars have found fame through the now slightly overlooked social networking site, MySpace. The likes of Lilly Allan and the Wombats have used the facility to reach out to existing fans as well as finding new fans amongst the users of the site. MySpace was/ is the perfect forum for this sort of publicity as developers created pages specifically for bands onto which they can upload music, pictures and tour information – much more detailed than Facebook’s alternative, the Facebook Page. To quote Andrew Collins in this month’s Word MySpace has become “a shortcut to sensation.”
However this view is not universally held. If you look through my del.icio.us tags (search myspace music) you will see there has been much discussion as to whether the social networking site is now failing the independent bands which put it on the map.
I realise that this is a very specific example, but it does highlight the huge scope of social media – I know that I have been concentrating a lot on the social networking side, but it is a huge marketing and PR tool as well. I have subscribed to a social media email alert and I would say that 90% of the news stories or blog posts are related to the huge untapped potential of social media as an advertising space. The article I translated for you touched upon this briefly by highlighting its viral nature which is vital to the whole set up of social media.
Now that the recession is really beginning to bite and money for advertising/ publicity is drying up I think we might see a resurgence in the use of social media as a means of breaking into the public consciousness. This, however, does raise its own ethical and regulatory issues. How can the resulting adverts be regulated? If you think about Facebook, the adverts are generated from the information that you put on your profile – which raises privacy issues. Consequently, in a very round about way, I would like to suggest that our presentation at least touches upon the marketing/ PR aspect to Web2.0.
