Week 5- Ruminations on Online Presence for Musicians

The last ten years has seen a radical transformation in the way the music industry, and musicians in particular, operate. Part of the task of an independent musician in the digital age is to not only sell and distribute one’s music but also find new ways in which to develop and maintain a fan base. In order to compete and survive, musicians are increasingly finding themselves using various online applications in order to push their musical output. Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Bandcamp, Soundcloud, Ustream, Youtube channels, and blog sites are a number of ways that musicians regularly connect with their public (and, if set up efficiently, often feed into one another).

One key concept here is “regularity”. In my own experience, frequency of output has a direct bearing on the attention span of your fan base. This applies to both the regularity of musical releases and use of social networking. Patchy and sporadic use of these online tools is far less effective than a measured flow of updates, information and output. This output doesn’t need to be ridiculously dense but regular enough to engage your public’s interest and keep them coming back to periodically check for updates. The problem of course is finding the right balance between online presence and studio endeavours- it makes little sense to spend all of one’s time developing an audience without producing music or having means of making money from this network (e.g. music for sale, performances, merchandise etc.).

Two online tools we have explored in the past weeks are Twitter and Youtube. For our latest digital project, we looked at one of Youtube’s most simple applications- archiving media. In the case of a producer/DJ, being able to share rare and out of print music with the public is a way of increasing your cultural cache and reaching like-minded music fans (especially if you have a song that has yet to surface on Youtube). While uploading copyrighted material can often prove problematic for website and users alike, posting little known songs from unsung musicians can help expose both the artist as well as one’s Youtube channel (especially useful, for instance, if promoting a radio show via that channel) and is less likely of being removed due to copyright infringement. What we attempted to do was create a video embodying the experience of not only hearing the music (in the highest possible Youtube audio resolution) but also of the simple pleasures of seeing a record playing juxtaposed with a cover shot of the album (re-creating, in some way, the physical and aural experience of enjoying vinyl). For this video we chose the song “Mandei Buscar” from the little known Brazilian album De Savoya from 1972. While sound quality was an important aspect of this project we realized after the fact this particular copy of the album had been fairly well played, not quite getting the sound we’d hoped. Nonetheless, being able to upload a hi-resolution vinyl rip to Youtube for the first time will help in casting a net for new fans.

While a Youtube channel may seem like a “long game” approach to amassing a like-minded fan base (it may take months or years for people to start discovering your videos), Twitter can function in a much more immediate, regular and abbreviated manner. Besides regularlity, part of the strategy of Twitter is minimizing phatic (i.e. banal) tweets in favour of topical, interesting, unsung, funny and insightful material. These tweets, coupled with plugging musical projects and strategic networking with other artists and fans, can effectively expand one’s followers in a short amount of time. For a portion of my research project I would like to examine how a number of music artists’ frequency and style of tweets impacts the number of followers they accrue. I would then cross-reference their twitter use with other popularity indicators and industry factors (i.e. how many “likes” their Facebook fan page might have, how many followers they have on Soundcloud, if they are signed to a major or independent label, where they are located, how long they have been relesing music etc.). Through this method of research I hope to reach some conclusions that will help me enhance and improve my own online presence.

Works Cited

danah boyd and Alice Marwick (2012) I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately: Twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience New Media and Society, 13(1), 114-133.

Ruth A. Deller (2011). Twittering on: audience research and participation using Twitter. Participations, 8 (1).

Kate Crawford (2009). Following you: Disciplines of listening in social media. Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 23 (4), 525-535.