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Social Media and the Music Industry

Rachael Moore
Adelphi University
Garden City, NY
Fall 2013


Abstract

In this day and age, the music industry is packed with artists struggling to stay
connected with their fans, make reasonable profit and avoid online piracy. Through
several social media websites, musicians have many platforms available to them to
develop and maintain their success. For seasoned veterans or ones just starting out in the
competitive business, the use of social media is crucial. In the eyes of a fan, social media
interaction with an artist allows them to feel a sense of shared intimacy. To do this, fans
often engage as promoters for a musician and their work, and sometimes they can even
help generate ideas for their album. In this thesis paper, dependence on social mediums
such as Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Apple iTunes, Spotify and Pandora
Internet Radio are discussed. I describe each companys rise to fame, how fans are
changing the communication gap between them and the musician and how artists are
interacting with fans in new ways, using these mediums, to create buzz about their music.




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Introduction
With todays dependence on technology, social media is imperative for artists
trying to survive in the music industry. What exactly is social media? It can be described
as a variety of new sources of online information that are created, initiated, circulated
and used by consumers intent on educating each other about products, brands, services,
personalities, and issues (Margiotta, 2012).
Artists must utilize what social media has to offer in order to be successful in this
day and age. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Pandora are among the few mediums that
can increase a musicians album sales, popularity and fan base. If pop superstar Justin
Bieber never posted videos of himself singing covers of songs on YouTube, his manager
Scooter Braun would not have discovered him. Hence, he would not be one of the most
famous and successful artists in the world.
The dependence on social media is so strong that it has become a main resource
for artists to promote their music and directly connect to their consumers. It bridges the
communication gap between the fan and the musician. It allows for announcements,
updates, and information regarding an artist to be seen in seconds.
Messages published on social media are consistent with the artist managements
promotional strategy and design of the star image. Management also controls the content,
frequency, timing and medium of this communication (Mangold and Faulds, 2009). By
setting up every tweet, post, advertisement, picture or video that an artist puts on social
media, managements goal is to stir up more attention for the artist and their work. In the
competitive music world, every promotional post on social media has the intent of selling
something to us within a certain timeframe.
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But, the billion-dollar industry did not always have the gift of social media to help
with sales. Throughout history, artists relied on word of mouth and talent to become
successful. A perfect example is The Beatles, who got their start by playing shows at The
Cavern Club, a small nightclub in Liverpool, England. With each performance, they
quickly became more popular, and their music circulated around England, Germany,
Scotland, and in due course the whole world. They were one of the most successful,
famous and influential bands in history; and they did not need to send a 140-character
tweet asking fans to buy their song on iTunes to become legends.
On the contrary, as technology and the industry progressed, an artists work and
their star image did not always revolve around pure talent and verbal communication. For
example, Rebecca Black, who is now sixteen, is a mediocre singer famous for her hit
song and music video Friday. She started out in the business after her parents paid a
production company to make a music video for her. In 2011, then fourteen-year-old
Black became an overnight sensation and her video went viral on YouTube with 180
million views. Thanks to the Internet, Black got her name and her music out there, no
matter how horrible or amazing the reviews from the public were.

Fans and Fandom
With any successful artist they have fans that love, support and buy what they are
producing. Today, the dedication and obsession that fans have for their favorite band or
musician is mind-blowing. A fan is described as someone who is an ardent admirer or
enthusiast for a type of performing art. From fans, you have fandom, which has many
different definitions and it has been argued that there is no set definition.
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According to Cornel Sandvoss, whether we find our object of fandom in Britney
Spears, Buffy the Vampire Slayer or the Boston Red Sox, these are all read and
negotiated as (mediated) texts by their fans. The way in which fans relate to such texts
and the performances that follow from this relationship vary between fan-to-fan cultures,
and indeed from fan to fan. Yet, they are all forms of consumption in which we build and
maintain an affective relationship with mediated texts and thus share fundamental
psychological, social and cultural premises and consequences (Sandvoss, 2005).
Sandvoss is explaining here that the art of fandom is learned when reading texts,
such as buying an album, listening to a song on the radio or following an artists tweets,
pictures and videos. By consuming this information, fans build a relationship with stars,
celebrities, musicians and artists on a deeper level, though this can sometimes be a one-
sided relationship.
Which segues into the next part of fandom: musicians blurring lines to make an
equal sided relationship with their fans, in turn seeing them as friends. As discussed by
Nancy Baym, nearly all music professionals seem convinced that social mediaand in
particular musicians use those media to connect with audiencesare key to their
survival (Baym, 2012). If it werent for social media, musicians would have a hard time
hearing from their fans and understanding their opinions via Twitter or Facebook. We
live in a world where online management is as important for a musician as the music
being produced and sold. On the opposite side of the spectrum, social media gives the
fans the benefit of knowing where their favorite stars are, what they are doing, and what
they are selling every time they tweet, post a picture, share, like, or favorite something.
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The relationship between artists and fans as friends over the Internet when
using social media has been so blurred that fans even act as promoters. For example, in
Nancy Baym and Robert Burnetts 2009 study about Swedish fan labor, they discuss
Swedish fans working for free by promoting and spreading the word about independent
bands. These fans highlight the bands music on news sites, archives, blogs and offline
by booking them (via the Internet) to play in local venuesthey list them as favorites on
their social networking site profiles, add them as friends on MySpace, put them on
embeddable playlists, use widgets to stream their music on their websites and profiles and
recommend them to others (Baym and Burnett, 2009).
Fans are beginning to become the leaders in the music industry besides the artists
themselves. The promotion that they accomplish shows a lot of dedication that anyone
can partake in as long as they have social media accounts. With an account on Facebook
or Twitter, fans have the freedom and newfound power to support their idols, all while
being able to fabricate anything they want about them too. The topic of fan fiction and
fan fantasies comes into play here. Fan fiction is exactly what it sounds like: stories that
fans make up. These stories are entirely for blogging purposes and usually involve fans
wishes or desires with their favorite musicians.
Sandvoss says that this part of fandom fills their void for pleasure, and it can be
explained through the founding father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, and his concept
of self. This Freudian theory states that we all have three layers of self: our id, which
makes up parts of our personality, our super-ego, which is the moral part of us that learns
and grows due to the ethics we learn from our parents and society, and our ego, which is
based on having a sense of reality and is our organized part that mediates between the
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desires of the id and the super-ego. The state of our self is hence always one of
repression, in which conscious and unconscious fantasies on the level of the id and the
ego articulate what the super-ego does not permit (Sandvoss, 2005).
He explains that the origin of fan fantasies and fan fiction comes from the time
when we were babies, learning and adapting with Freuds theory, though never to our
knowledge. For example, when a baby is breast-feeding, all of their pleasures that arise
from it are lost due to their lack of control. We can compare this pleasure principle, as
Freud calls it, to social media. Meaning such pleasures, enjoyment and sexual desire can
be lived and fostered. There can be little doubt that such pleasures form a key motivation
for the continuing relationship between fans and their object of fandom (Sandvoss,
2005).
Freuds theory shows us that by using fan fiction and fan fantasies, fans are
engaging in activities where having a pleasurable and enjoyable experience puts their
day-to-day frustrations and tribulations on reserve. Furthermore, fans consuming the
information that artists and musicians post on social media, cause them to forget about
their problems for the time being because they are focused on their current pleasure
principle.

Twitter
Fans have shown their support in many ways, but they are so passionate that they
have helped artists make decisions via Twitter regarding the next piece of music they
should release. The social media website was created by software architect Jack Dorsey,
a college dropout from New York University, in 2006. The site started out with the vision
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of being a place where people constantly update statuses on profiles, and the statuses
named tweets would be limited to 140 characters (Perrilliat, 2012).
Although it was unbelievably the butt of many jokes in the beginning, the site
began to grow. Twitter started catching the attention of celebrities, musicians, fans,
politicians and the public. Today, there are a total of 554,750,000 active registered users,
an average of 58 million tweets being sent out per day, and 9,100 tweets being sent out
every second. In 2010, the revenue for Twitter was $45,000,000, in 2011, it was
$139,000,000, in 2012, it was $259,000,000 and the sites projected revenue for 2013 is
$399,500,000. It is the third most popular social media website in the world, behind
Facebook and YouTube.
But, what makes Twitter popular among musicians? The site allows them to
directly stay in contact with their fans, being the easiest way to get their attention through
140 character tweets. These tweets can spark informal conversations or serve as sales
pitches, where artists post links to their music, website or blog. On twitter, users may
direct questions or comments to others by typing an @ symbol followed by another
users handle in a tweet. Twitter then alerts the other user of the mention. Alternatively,
users may reply, favorite the tweet, retweet the tweet, or post it again, with or without
commenting on it (McCollum, 2011). Twitter makes it easy to talk to anyone, since all
of its content is made visible to the public. It is acceptable to tweet or follow people you
do not have a connection with in real life, where compared to Facebook, an impromptu
message or friend request is not welcomed as openly.
Essentially, tweeting is a simple concept that anyone can be successful at. It can
operate as an artists secret weapon when it comes to revenue, and it only takes posting
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links to iTunes asking fans to download music, or posting their newest music video on
YouTubes Vevo to get views. The NPD Group, Inc. states that 33 percent of all Twitter
users reported buying a CD in the previous three months, Twitter users purchased 77
percent more digital downloads than non-users, one-third listened to music on a social
networking site and 39 percent said they watched a music video online compared to the
25 percent of all web users (Perrilliat, 2012). This data demonstrates that Twitter gives
fans that extra push to purchase what their favorite artist is selling. It influences them to
make significant choices regarding their money and keeps them highly interested in a
musicians career.
With fans hanging onto their idols every word in a tweet, each time they interact
with them they are hoping the superstar will reply. They are attracted to Twitter to satisfy
their social and psychological needs. This brings us back to Freuds theory of self and
how fans use Twitter as an escape from their daily trials and tribulations. Foulkes and
Katz explain how people use the media to gratify certain needs (Perrilliat, 2012), and
this relates to fans feeling intimate with their favorite artist when they share a piece of
their life with them. For example, fans go so far on Twitter to get their idols to notice
them that they tweet extremely personal messages about themselves for everyone to see,
in hopes of getting a reply. They believe they are having a personal connection with an
artist, but this misunderstanding of intimacy on Twitter is merely a substitute for intimacy
and social interaction in real life.
Straying away from fan usage as psychological, fans still manage to get close to
the artists that they admire. For example, British pop musician Imogen Heap had the help
of her fans when releasing her 2009 album, Ellipse. Using video diaries, blog posts, and
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status updates across sites like MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Ustream and YouTube,
Heap kept fans apprised of the albums progress, solicited their input on demos, and
included them on other aspects of the production process, from the design of her album
artwork to the writing of her press biography (Morris, 2013).
She called it the Ellipse campaign, where 40 short video blogs that lasted between
5 and 12 minutes, covered the artist bringing fans into her personal life and the record
making process. The videos fascinated 15,000 to 100,000 views and hundreds of
comments. The videos show Heap turning her basement in her family home into a sound
recording studio where the continuation of the recording process also gets seen. Through
the videos, Heap moves into the rooms and screens of her viewers, and they move into
her recording studio. They open up a moment and a process that is traditionally closed off
to fans (Morris, 2013).
Throughout these videos, fans heard the new sounds for Heaps album and the
type of music she was creating, which is a very rare privilege to have. As the videos and
Heaps progress continued, fans got played a short preview of a song that Heap was
working on, asking viewers for their opinions. Through YouTubes commenting function,
fans suggested changes or offered their advice (Morris, 2013). Heap acknowledged her
fans contributions through Twitter where she also started tweeting about a song she was
having trouble with producing. Heap shared videos to multiple versions of the song
because she could not choose which one should go on the final album. With the help of
her fans tweeting their input, she finally decided. In a sense, fans here were taking part
in production decisions (Morris, 2013).
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Imogen Heaps 2009 album process is a perfect example of how fans are greatly
involved in an artists music today. Because of Heaps warm welcoming videos, fans got
to feel closer to the star. One fan tweeted: I appreciated when artists explain a part of
their inner selves to fans, so that we can see the person behind the music we adore. Thank
you! (Morris, 2013). Through Twitter and other social media sites that Heap utilized,
overall success was achieved for her album and fans felt the exciting, misunderstood
feeling of intimacy.

Facebook
Like Twitter, musicians utilize Facebook to acquire a bigger following too. Mark
Zuckerberg, a computer programmer turned entrepreneur, was one of the five co-
founders and creators of the most popular social networking site in the world. Today, his
personal wealth is estimated to be $19 billion, all because of an idea he and his friends
had during their college years at Harvard University. They called it thefacebook, and it
launched for students on February 4, 2004. The site started out small, only giving access
to students in the dormitories of Harvard, but Zuckerberg wanted to share his website
with other schools as well. He got his site onto campuses like New York University,
Stanford University, Dartmouth College, Columbia University, University of
Pennsylvania, Brown University, Cornell University and Yale University.
Possessing a lot of drive and focus, Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard after his
sophomore year and moved to California to continue working on Facebook. This sudden
life change that Zuckerberg made paid off, because today, Facebook has 1.11 billion
users and 751 million of those users are going on the site from their mobile devices. For
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an artist, Facebook provides great marketing and a way for many people to like their
page, hence liking them and their music. Similar to Twitter, Facebook allows fans to
interact with their favorite musicians when they post something. Fans can like, comment,
and share what an artist posts, and sometimes artists may answer or friend request them.
Today, the amount of likes for hip-hop artists on Facebook is a combined 314,540,
country musicians have 299,700 likes, rock & roll comes in third with 244,840 likes, pop
artists have 224,140 likes, jazz is fifth with 106,000 likes and classical comes in last with
66,380 likes.
All of these different genres have artists with one thing in common: they want
people to listen and buy their music. To integrate listening to music on Facebook, the
billion-dollar company partnered with services such as Spotify, MOG, Soundcloud, Vevo
and others. When a user listens to songs and albums on any of these services, their music
picks get posted onto their profile and onto their friends newsfeeds. Another feature each
music service has is giving suggestions to users on what other music theyd like based on
the music they previously listened to.
These tools work together with the help of open graph, one of the social
networks basic tools. Facebook introduced it in 2010, and it has since opened up to
third-party applications. For instance, if you choose to log onto Spotify through Facebook,
the music application uses open graph technology to post what youre listening to onto
your friends news feeds. Friends can then comment, like, or listen to the song as well.
Its a way to take a static action (a user listening to a song) and turn it into a potential
social action (Lafferty, 2012).
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Open graph is a clever take on sharing links, which is exclusively what Twitter
does when someone tweets. Facebook has explored this concept of sharing what youre
listening to online even deeper. With open graph, users see and hear what their friends
are doing, not what a musician or a brand (that they have no personal relation to) is
asking them to listen to or purchase. Since the music applications launched in 2011,
people have shared their listening activity more than 1.5 billion times with their friends
using the music apps that have integrated the open graph (Parfeni, 2011). This has
resulted in two to ten times more active users on some of the biggest music applications,
all credit to Facebook.
Musicians starting out in the business and famous artists who are already
successful can use this information to work in their favor on Facebook. For starters, if
they have a following online, their fan base will increase. Their admirers on Facebook
represent their real world supporters and the people who come to support them at
concerts, album signings and different events. People, from everyday music listeners to
major industry execs to late night TV shows to music festivals who want to consider you,
will check your Facebook page as a snapshot of where youre at and what you have to
offer. If you have 50,000 fans, they imagine reaching those fans, having them spread the
word, etc. You are now a big time business and you start attracting success (Moore,
2013).
But, knowing how to use Facebook the right way and being efficient about
posting is very important. For example, artists should always make sure they are posting
something daily and repeating these posts for the people who like their page. This is
because sometimes when users are scrolling through their news feed, theyll give a post a
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quick glance and just keep scrolling. If an artists goal on Facebook is to have fans click
on their link to iTunes or YouTube, they must keep updating their supporters with the
same link to remind them of their work.
By doing this, there are some things to remember: Its perfectly fine (even
advisable) to post your links several times a week to achieve maximum reach, but for
every promotional post you drop on your page you must be posting 3-5+ pieces of
valuable content to break up the noise (Robertson, 2013). Therefore, you can post
pictures, videos or other information regarding music to keep fans updated.
Wei and Yi utilize these tips in their study on online branding and what
characteristics a musician should possess in order to market themselves and their music
on Facebook. They took 10 of the most popular pop music artists on Facebook (Justin
Bieber, Lady Gaga, and Katy Perry, to name a few) who had a strong social media
following, and used their newest published posts as their starting place. Then, they took
the first 100 comments from fans on their Facebook posts to investigate. Comments were
calculated by separating them into three categories: positive, negative, and neutral. By
using this method, a general picture of how the fans reacted on the posts was achieved.
Therefore, Wei and Yi conducted the performance of each artists personal brand and
marketing strategy on Facebook.
As a result, they found characteristics that artists needed to showcase through
their Facebook, which allowed fans to become attracted to what they posted. They were:
extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness and openness to experience. Out of the
characteristics they tested, they found that openness to experience is what artists should
practice more on the social media site. Artists with a higher amount of openness can
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easily get more attention in public. Openness refers to original, creative and curious
qualities. Artists with these qualities are more than essential to social, musical evolution
(Wei and Yi, 2011) For example, Lady Gagas music, image and branding on Facebook
showcases her original perspectives on pop music, changing peoples traditional views.
Therefore, her openness with her fans allows her more attention, experience and
popularity on Facebook. Regarding all of these innovative tips and interesting studies,
Facebook proves to be the number one source on the Internet for musicians to market
themselves.

MySpace
But, there are a lot of other social media platforms that artists use, and some came
before Facebook. One of the original mediums for musicians was MySpace, the social
networking site with an emphasis on music. Co-founded in 2003 by Chris DeWolfe and
Tom Anderson, the site got help from eUniverse employees who saw its potential. Today
they are known as Intermix Media, but the eUniverse team was amongst some of the first
users on MySpace. In 2005, Rupert Murdochs News Corporation purchased the social
networking company for $580 million.
In 2006, MySpace decided to start up in the United Kingdom, then China, and
then the 100

millionth account was created in the Netherlands. By 2007, it was the most
popular social networking site, valued at $12 billion and defeating Facebook in terms of
traffic. College students only used Facebook at the time and Zuckerbergs company was
falling a little flat. Contrary to today, MySpace is not as popular since Facebook and
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Twitter have begun to rule, but it still has a good amount of users, especially bands and
musicians.
Over eight million artists and bands have set up their profiles on MySpace.
Artists and bands can upload songs, show music videos, communicate with fans, and
even sell MP3 downloads through MySpace. The site has been hugely successful in
helping artists promote their music, as it offers many great free tools (such as bulletins,
activity streams, blogs, etc.) and focuses on building a community of artists and music
fans (Chen, De and Hu, 2009).
But, how did artists starting out in the business gain a following on MySpace
before Facebook and Twitter? When it was in its glory, the site allowed users to
personalize their profile with different backgrounds and effects, unlike Facebook, which
has the same, simple layout for everyones profile. MySpace allowed bands to set up
playlists of their songs for fans to listen to, include upcoming tour dates and recent blog
posts, and showcase their top friend list and comment section (which was open to the
public).
Another tool of MySpace that bands and musicians utilized is the bulletin board,
which was made up of posts that everyone in their friend list could see. They were
useful in the sense that artists could reach all of their friends (i.e. music fans) without
messaging them individually. Once a user became an artists friend, that user would
automatically see the artists bulletin and be able to read it until it expired in 10 days
(Chen, De and Hu, 2009). Additionally, artists could promote themselves on the site
through the activity stream (previously named friend updates), where their friends and
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fans could view their recent messages and updates if they chose to receive them. Fans
could also choose to get emails to inform them of such updates on their activity stream.
However, these features changed in 2012 when Justin Timberlake, who has
ownership in the company, introduced the new MySpace as strictly a music site where
users can start radio stations (similar to Pandora Internet Radio), create playlists and
stream music. MySpace got rid of its other features (i.e. games) and deleted the old,
classic MySpace without the consent of its users.
Many have argued that the social networking site was better than Facebook when
it came to music. When it was popular in 2004, it was the place fans would to go to find
out everything about their favorite band. Today, there are so many social media sites to
get information from, and sometimes you have to go to all of them just to find what
youre looking for. MySpace had everything on the same page and was essentially an
interactive business card, a piece of free ad space upon which bands built brands
(Sumney, 2012).
To build their brand on MySpace, musicians planned gigs, found new artists to
collaborate with and became closer with their fans. Additionally, musicians gained
compensation. A 2007 study suggests a correlation between a spike in the number of
friends linked to a MySpace Music profile and future CD sales (Dhar and Chang, 2009).
In another informal case study from 2008, people examined how several top artists total
revenues from advertising, downloads and album sales related to the number of friends
on MySpace Music. The case study suggests that at least some artists can earn significant
revenues through streaming music. When tends of thousands of songs are streamed each
day, earning even a penny per song can be highly lucrative. MySpace profiles also allow
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artists to sell downloadable albums (as opposed to streaming music), ringtones and
advertising that can add to these figures (Antin and Earp, 2010).
Therefore, having a MySpace Music profile is key to commercial success and
compensation. Many artists loved today got their big break using MySpace, and they
were even signed to MySpaces own record label, MySpace Records. For example, Sean
Kingston, Colbie Caillat, Owl City and Lily Allen all made the most of what MySpace
had to offer and now they are household names. The social media site was a great place
to get noticed if you were an unsigned musician. Although the same thing happens to
artists today with sites like YouTube, Myspace definitely started this trend. The original
social networking site emphasized on music started the idea of fans becoming closer with
their idols and giving them the chance to have social intimacy with them.

YouTube
But, no social media website is quite as unique as YouTube, which was founded
in February, 2005 by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, who were previously
employees of PayPal. YouTube is the most famous video-sharing website in the world,
where users can upload, view, share, comment and like all types of videos. Categories
range from music, film, comedy, informative, gaming, parody, animal, food, sport,
reviews, babies, makeup/fashion tutorials, action, entertainment and many more. Since its
start, YouTube became popular very quickly, and sixteen months after its creation, 100
million clips were being viewed per day. In October 2008, the site attracted 100 million
American views a day, estimated to be over two thirds of the Internet users in the United
States (Cayari, 2011).
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In 2006, Google purchased the site for $1.65 billion. YouTubes founders have
huge net worths, and are considered to be young millionaires. With estimation, Chad
Hurley has $335 million, Steve Chen has $300 million and Jawed Karim has $64 million.
Today, YouTube has 800 million+ monthly visitors, 72 hours+ video uploaded per
minute, one million+ partner program members, it is the second largest search engine,
bigger than Yahoo, Bing and ASK combined and it has four billion hours of video being
viewed each month (which is over 450,000 years of video viewed each month) (Bullas,
2013).
With the intermingling of professional music artists and beginner singers covering
songs to make it in the business, YouTube and music are perfectly connected. Popular
musicians and artists rely on YouTube to get their music videos seen through Vevo, a
music video website that is owned and operated by Universal Music Group, Google,
Sony Music Entertainment and Abu Dhabi Media. Vevos main goal is to attract more
advertisers, with Google obtaining half of the revenue. For artists like Rihanna, Lady
Gaga, Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, Justin Bieber and One Direction, their music videos are
amongst Vevos certified videos and have broken records when it comes to most
viewed music videos and most followed artists.
For artists that are just starting out, YouTube is a great way to market their music
and begin to obtain a group of supporters. Though some people look at YouTube as being
a website where amateurs are wasting their time posting poorly made videos, others see
YouTube as their chance at stardom, their most understanding teacher, or their meeting
place with closest friends. It serves as a virtual coffee house where people can share ideas
and gather with likeminded and contrasting individuals to discuss ideas, art and music
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(Cayari, 2011). Though there is pressure to stand out on YouTube because many other
people are posting the same covers to the same songs that users know so well, it is
important for artists to find a way to make their own version of a song popular.
Many YouTube fans have different tastes in music, so musicians should not worry
about never getting views or support. With YouTubes famous recommended videos
sidebar, viewers can discover many videos full of different singers that coordinate to their
liking. Often, artists will share original songs that they have written, recorded and
produced with their audience, and usually provide a free download of the track. The
possibilities for a beginner musician on YouTube are limitless, and many of them record
themselves singing covers or originals, playing guitar, teaching chords on the guitar,
doing instructional videos on the piano, collaborating with other artists and showing off
their musical skills.
In a study conducted in 2009 by Cayari, Wade Johnston, a YouTube musician,
then at the age of seventeen, was researched to better understand how YouTube affects
the way people consume, create and share music. Johnston was a new YouTube user
that became very popular after getting the inspiration to start his own channel from other
YouTube musicians. Johnston had covers of professional musicians and sang original
songs. He was promoting his own merchandise through his channel, as well as
collaborating with other YouTube artists (Cayari, 2009). When asked about his purpose
on YouTube, Johnston explained, I use YouTube to promote myself as a musician, a
person, and most importantly, a songwriter.
Johnston successfully promoted himself when he took a risk in one of his videos
by reaching out to a YouTube ukulele player that he admired. This musician noticed, took
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a liking to Johnston, became aware of his talents, and featured him in one of her videos.
Soon enough, Johnston became YouTube famous and went from 64 subscribers to 390
to 4,000, and eventually to 22,000.
In the results of this survey, Cayari concludes that Johnston gained fans through
the help of the ukulele player, but also because of his covers of popular songs. Johnston
says, If I choose a popular song, then its obviously going to get a lot more views than a
song people havent heard of (Cayari, 2009). His supporters also stem from search
engine algorithms. At his highest peak of popularity, when people searched for Jason
Mrazs song, Im Yours on YouTube, Johnstons cover of the song would show up on
the first page. That was a key factor in how he got increasing video views and subscribers.
Furthermore, by being himself, producing his own music, playing the ukulele, and
singing cover songs, Johnston managed YouTube success.
If people are lucky enough, this could also happen to them. Or, they could be
noticed on an even bigger scale than Johnston and get signed to a record label. That is
simply what happened to superstar Justin Bieber. By posting videos on the site of him
singing at competitions, his original intent was to show his family back home in Canada.
Little did he know, Bieber got the attention of manager Scooter Braun, who introduced
him to singer-songwriter, Usher, and the rest of the story is history. He is one of the
wealthiest musicians under the age of 20, with an estimated net worth of $130 million.
On the contrary, some argue that YouTube has hurt the music industry. With
users having access to upload anything they want, songs and albums have gotten leaked
on the site. For example, fans of the British/Irish boy band One Direction are extremely
passionate and dedicated that they managed to leak a song off of the bands newest album,
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Midnight Memories, before it was even released. They posted the rough-cut version of
the song on YouTube and it blew up around the world. Even though YouTube has
copyright laws, the song has been reproduced to different videos many times, so it would
have been a challenge to shut every single video down.
But, in the end, this is definitely not a negative issue. With YouTubes audio-
fingerprinting technology, Content ID, it ensures that people can upload videos that
would normally have to be deleted for copyright reasons, with associated royalties going
to musicians and other copyright holders as part of YouTubes Partner Program.
Essentially, this does what used to be considered impossible: enabling copyright holders
to profit from copyright infringement (Buskirk, 2011). Either way you look at it,
YouTube is definitely helping the musicians who use it through Vevo, and up and
coming artists are learning how to market themselves too.

Apple iTunes
There are four major record groups dominating the music industry: Universal
Music Group, Sony BMG Music Entertainment, EMI Group and Warner Music Group.
Combined, these four groups account for an estimated 82 percent of the music market.
Independent labels make up the remaining 18 percent (Dhar, 2007).
If an artist belongs to one of these record groups, they are likely to be very
popular. But, with social media and the digital sharing of music online, these record
groups have had a decline in sales over the last decade. Some record labels have argued
that this has cost their industry $55 billion in revenue. A recent study found that in 2010
alone, revenues from global recorded music fell by over 8 percent, amounting to almost
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$1.5 billion. The increase in digital sales of 5.3 percent ($4.6 billion) did not compensate
for the decline in physical sales of 14.2 percent or $10.4 billion (Dewan and
Ramaprasad, 2011).
So, in what forms do songs and albums get sold? Throughout history, consumers
have bought vinyl records, physical CDs and digital downloads. Today, buying MP3
tracks and albums online are without a doubt the most popular, but it was not always that
way. Physical CDs and vinyl records once made up 100 percent of sales in the 90s, 80s,
70s and so on. But, according to The Nielson Company & Billboards 2012 Music
Industry Report, Since 2011, CD sales declined 13 percent, yet digital albums are up 14
percent and digital tracks are up 5 percent. It looks like digital music is taking over
when it comes to sales.
One of the leaders in these sales is iTunes, the most popular media library
application developed by Apple Inc. It is used by consumers to play games, read books,
download and listen to music, watch music videos and watch movies. Through the iTunes
Store, users can purchase all of these different kinds of media. Originally named
SoundJam MP, the iTunes store was released in 2003 after being bought by Apple from
Casady and Greene, a software publishing company. With each new version of iTunes
changing and growing every year, the media player has 575 million users who spend $20
billion a year. On average, iTunes users spend $40 per year on music in the store, and 80
percent of United States consumers who download paid music online, do so via iTunes.
This brings music piracy into play. Waldfogel explains how in 2002 a consumer
faced a choice between stealing, say, three songs and buying a 12-song CD that contained
a few songs he or she wanted bundled with 9 more that he or she did not. Since 2003,
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consumers have faced a song-by-song choice between stealing and a la carte purchase for
about $0.99 on iTunes.
When it comes to choosing music to download on iTunes compared to having the
ability to illegally download music online, Waldfogel conducted a study using a survey
from 500 University of Pennsylvania undergraduates. He asked them how music file
sharing and sales displacement operate in the iTunes era. Participants took an online
survey to indicate one of the following statements about 50 popular songs on the iTunes
charts: 1) I do not have a copy, 2) I have a legal digital copy, 3) I have a legal physical
copy, 4) I have a shared copy, 5) I have access through a subscription service.
Respondents were also asked to indicate their willingness to pay for each of the 50 songs
(Waldfogel, 2009).
The results showed that though the students in the sample only purchase or only
pirate music online, many of them participate in both forms of possession. The
respondents have legal copies of an average of 5.54 songs and shared copies of an
average of 6.71 songs. They have access to an average of 1.97 songs via subscription
services. Men steal slightly more songs than women in this sample, and women buy more
than men. Men have access to more songs through subscription services. With the
respondents who either bought or stole songs on the list, a third (110) did both, 104 only
bought, 77 only stole and 37 neither bought nor stole songs (but only had subscription
access) (Waldfogel, 2009).
From the evidence in this study, it is clear that pirating music online compared to
iTunes downloads is becoming more popular. Today, 18 percent of Internet users ages
12 and over have recently pirated content, while just 9 percent fear getting caught
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(Garside, 2013). Many people want to catch the pirates, and to do that, lawsuits have
been filed and music fans have faced court cases and lawyer fees that cost thousands of
dollars. In 2003, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) issued
subpoenas to Internet service providers demanding disclosure of the identities of
computer users suspected of sharing copyrighted music files online. By March 2004, the
RIAA had initiated close to 2,000 lawsuits (Condry, 2004). What consumers may not
understand is that pirating is illegal, and by stealing, though they are committing these
crimes through the safety of their bedrooms, their acts can have negative effects on them
in the long run.
Relating this to social media, in a study conducted by Dewan and Ramaprasad,
they discuss how album sales can be related to negative blog buzz. This can occur when
an entire blog post features mp3 links for all of the songs from an album. Thus, a spike
in buzz about a piece of music increases the volume of information about it, and at the
same time, the spike in buzz also results in a jump in the supply of free music that is
easily accessible to interested consumers (Dewan and Ramaprasad, 2011). On these
blogs and social media sites today, song leaks allow consumers to hear full tracks without
actually purchasing the music, hence, they are pirating songs when they illegally
download. This results in less money for an artist and ultimately, less money for media
libraries such as iTunes.

Spotify and Pandora Internet Radio
As consumers and fans get enjoyment from music, they are extremely dependent
not only on illegal downloads and the iTunes store, but music streaming services such as
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Spotify and Pandora Internet Radio. Both are leading the pack of music applications, but
competition between the two has always been obvious. Spotify has 20 million songs in
its library, while Pandora offers 1 million. Pandora has 65 million users compared with
Spotifys 20 million. (Rossman, 2013).
Spotify is a subscription service that offers music from the four major record
groups: Universal Music Group, Sony BMG Music Entertainment, EMI Group and
Warner Music Group. It was born in 2008 in Sweden, but since then, the music service
has gained worldwide recognition. It came to the United States in 2011, giving users the
chance to make their own playlists of songs from different genres. After that, users are
able to send their playlists and music selections to their peers through email, Facebook,
Twitter, Myspace and other social media platforms.
But, when listening and sharing music, Spotify requires that users be subscribed
to their site. To sign up, users must have either a Facebook account or they can make a
username. The service allows for a six-month free trail, but following that, consumers
must pay the fees if they want to eliminate advertisements. For $5 a month, they can
listen to Spotifys music library on their laptop. For $10 a month, users can get access
from their smartphone. Currently, Spotify is available for consumers with Windows,
Macintosh or Linux, and is supported by iPhone, Android and Blackberry devices.
Taking into account the increasing rate of piracy occurring online, Spotify is
beginning to help. According to the International Federation of Phonographic Industry,
95 percent of music downloaded online in 2010 was illegal. However, Spotify has the
potential to drastically reduce pirated music. After one month in the United States,
Spotify already had 1.4 million users and 175,000 paying customers (Wiegandt, 2013).
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Regarding artists, when their music is played on Spotify, they get paid a
surprisingly minimal amount. Artists receive less than one tenth of a cent per stream,
which means one million streams would add up to less than one thousand dollars. The
payouts that have been reported are actually much less. Lady Gagas track Poker Face
was streamed more than a million times in a five-month period, and she received only
$167.95. According to a report by David McCandless, an independent artist on Spotify
would need over four million streams per month to earn $1,160.96 (Wiegandt, 2013).
Another reason why artists are not getting paid well from Spotify is because of the
companys decline within the past few years. In 2009, the service experienced a loss of
$26 million in revenue. They made $10.7 million from subscriptions and $7 million on
advertising income, but the cost of goods, which consists of licensing fees paid to record
labels, was at $28.4 million.
The record labels for these artists have a lot of control regarding compensation.
Most artists contracts clearly state that payment from streaming services like Spotify
must be split between the artist and the record label. This is because Spotify must get
approval from the copyright owner of a song, usually employed at the artists record label,
in order to have the license to stream it on their service. Interestingly enough, the four
major record groups own stock in Spotfiy, giving them the control. The returns on the
stock investment are unlikely to filter down to payments for the artists...so artists
resentment should be rightly focused on record labels rather than Spotify (Wiegandt,
2013).
Similar to Spotify, Pandora Internet Radio is another music service. Tim
Westergren, currently with a net worth of $22 million, had the idea of bringing different
27
styles of music together into an organized pattern using the Music Genome Project. After
that, Pandora Radio was founded in 2000 and officially launched in 2005. It is considered
to be one of the most popular Internet radio services in the world. Today, Pandora has
roughly 16,763,000 monthly visitors, 80 million registered users, 20,000 artists featured
on its service, 72.4 million active listeners as of the end of November 2013 and is valued
at $5 billion in stock.
The music streaming service allows consumers to listen to different radio stations
filled with their favorite musicians and artists they may not have heard before. Through
the Music Genome Project, over 400 specifications for each song are created, resulting
in a deeply detailed hand-built musical taxonomy, in essence the musical DNA for each
song (Moyer, 2013). Users can give positive or negative feedback when a new song
starts to play through Pandoras thumbs up or thumbs down feature. While listening,
users have the opportunity to buy songs through online libraries such as iTunes and
Amazon MP3 or they can share their stations on social media platforms such as Facebook
and Twitter.
Like Spotify, Pandora Internet Radio requires users to make an account and
become a member. They can retrieve Pandora on any Windows, Macintosh or Linux
laptop and their iPhone, Android or Blackberry device. But, to enjoy live streaming
music without constant advertisements, Pandora One was created. The paid subscription
service offers ad-free listening, a desktop application to play Pandora without a web
browser, high quality audio, and fewer interruptions, including non-stop play for up to 5
hours. The cost of a Pandora One subscription is $3.99 a month or $36 a year for the
service (Moyer, 2013).
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For artists on Pandora, compensation is very low. When asked about his rate from
Pandora, David Lowery of the band Cracker explained, as a songwriter, Pandora paid
me $16.89 for 1,159,000 plays of Low last quarter. This is less than I make from a
single t-shirt sale. Lowery goes on to explain that he only owns 40 percent of the
songwriting royalties of the song, so actually the amount paid to solo songwriters
multiply by 2.5, or $42.25. Using that $42.45 as a base line, and going on the 1,159,000
number of plays, that translates into 0.003 cents per play on Pandora in terms of
songwriter royalty (McMillan, 2013).
As these results show, Pandora is paying artists considerably equal amounts of
money compared to Spotify, give or take a few cents per play depending on the artists
popularity and song. Thus, Pandora and Spotify truly represent the new wave of music
streaming and technology, and how the industry has drastically changed since vinyl
records and physical CDs. Additionally, with music piracy occurring online, artists are
making less money than they would if a consumer bought their song on iTunes or
listened to it on Spotify or Pandora Radio. These social media music applications are
shaping the industrys future and ultimately controlling the profit of the four major record
groups.

Conclusion
In this thesis paper, I discussed how social media and the music industry
intertwine. From a popular artist like Katy Perry to an up and coming YouTube singer,
both must utilize what social media has to offer in order to be successful. They need
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mediums such as Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Apple iTunes, Spotify and
Pandora Internet Radio to continue to exist in the music business.
The dependence on social media is so strong that it has become a main resource
for artists to directly connect with their supporters, fans and consumers. When it comes to
fans, they are the backbone to an artists fame and fortune. Their dedication and passion
helps artists generate and maintain success.
Throughout my thesis, I pointed out several models and studies regarding fans,
artists and how their needs were met through platforms like Twitter and YouTube. For
example, if Imogen Heap did not use Twitter to get feedback from her fans during her
Ellipse campaign, she would not have released her album with the incorporation of her
fans production decisions. Hence, it would not have been as special as it was.
Without YouTube, Wade Johnston would not have had such a rapid rise to
Internet fame. Through the help of his growing fan base that enjoyed his covers and
listened to his original songs, Johnston became YouTube famous. He was able to create
and share his music for free, gaining a group of supporters without having had a
management team or a record deal.
I also discussed online piracy and music services like iTunes, Spotify and Pandora
Internet Radio. Even though the four major record labels own 82 percent of the music
market, with the increasing popularity of pirating music online, companies like Warner
Music Group and many signed artists are making less money. Illegal downloading of
music compared to downloading music on iTunes has become the norm.
With Spotify and Pandora Internet Radio, less revenue for artists is also
recognized. An example I discussed was that artists receive less than one tenth of a cent
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per stream, which means one million streams would add up to less than one thousand
dollars. An artist as huge as Lady Gaga, with her track Poker Face, only received
$167.95 for streams over a million times in a five-month period.
Finally, I have concluded that in order for music artists and fans to stay
connected, social media is essential. Also, these platforms are ultimately controlling the
profit of musicians and the four major record groups. All of the mediums I touched on are
helping shape artists, their music and the industrys future.

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