Everyone is fighting for attention right now, because there is so much music. It’s all accessible. If you have any kind of access to a streaming service, you can listen to millions and millions of songs and so many different types of artists. So, it’s really hard to market music simply to get someone’s attention or simply to have somebody pay attention. It’s interesting, because on the one hand you have fewer gatekeepers actually getting your music out there.
If you want to publish music, you have fewer barriers to overcome. But, on the other hand, because everything is so accessible, it’s hard to really market that and have not only writers and music journalists pay attention to that music, but also consumers — having people really figure out what your aesthetic is, what your reason is to pay attention to you.
It’s difficult. It’s something that those who market music, those who position music, are increasingly trying to figure out. Social media is incredibly important to what we do. It’s interesting, because 10 years ago you would be in a situation where you had to pay attention to Twitter, you had to pay attention to Facebook. Now, in this year, you have to position articles, videos, anything really that you produce, with social media in mind. You have to understand how a tweet should function when thinking about linking to a cover story, linking to a video, linking to an essay or a news story.
You have to think about Facebook, and especially Instagram, as Instagram becomes increasingly more important. You have to embrace the role that social media plays as a gatekeeper. And obviously that extends to search and optimizing your stories or your content for search engines. But social media is such a key component of what we do, because it’s a means of discovery, more than anything. If you want to have something read, it needs to be able to be shared. And the way that happens now is social media.
Coming from the artist side, digital editorial coverage and social media is massive. Social media is the easiest way for you to get in front of millions of people without having to be on the radio, without having to physically go places to play these giant arenas and things like that. It’s not easy to reach this amount of people on social media, but it is possible. There are platforms like YouTube that have broken huge stars, Justin Bieber. And Vine, which is no longer an app, played a big part in Shawn Mendes’ career.
Social media is helping these artists grow, and it helps them connect with people, whether you’re a new artist connecting with new people or a huge artist connecting with people on a day-to-day basis. I feel like I know some really big people because I see what they do on their Instagram stories every day. With digital content and articles and stuff like that, the process of picking up a magazine to find new artists is very, very different. I used to find artists by the small lines in CD catalogs.
It was, like, “Thank you so and so,” and that’s how I used to find new artists or people I didn’t know. But now we have things like “related artists” on Spotify and these playlists. You can be on “new music Friday” and you could have hundreds of thousands of plays just being a new artist, if you get that great placement on a playlist. So, there’s a lot of new aspects to the music industry with Spotify, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, especially.
And just like with all these different blogs and stuff, you can find new artists and you can help cultivate those artists with all this new digital content.
