Recently, my brother has been trying to launch a music career. It's pretty normal nowadays for bands to be launched online, as opposed to the traditional form of getting a few low-key gigs at a pub to start off somewhere. Take for example, the band Gorillaz, who pretty much started out as an online band only (they did no live gigs at first) and used MySpace to get popular. This got me thinking about the options that an aspiring musican has to gain exposure through the new media forms, these being social networking and viral video sites. I want to look at a few sites and lay out the pros and cons of their use as music exposure platforms.
Facebook is probably one of the most useful platforms for this purpose; with having 500 million active members and being at the forefront of most media-savvy minds, it's a pretty good place to start. Being able to upload, say, video performances of songs and have them on your friend's newsfeed definitely helps to get your music out there. The way Facebook is set up is that something that your friend may comment on is shown on the friend's friend's newsfeed, therefore catering for the viral spread of media (especially video). The downside is that while it has the ability to create fan pages for anything, it doesn't have a specialised music section, unlike the next platform.
MySpace is arguably the most well-known platform for launching bands and artists, owing to the fact that the Music section of MySpace is well established in music industries worldwide. An artist/band is able to create a fully customisable site with music, graphics, influences, pictures, info about upcoming shows, basically anything anyone needs to know about the band. MySpace peaked in popularity a few years ago and while it has been overtaken by Facebook as the premier social networking site, it still has a large influence on especially the American music industry and is popular as a site for teens to go explore and find new bands and types of music.
YouTube, being a viral video site, automatically has an advantage over the other two in that it deals exclusively with video, making the material posted more representative of the artist and more visually engaging too. YouTube has been a launching ground for countless 'online celebrities', who usually start by uploading covers of popular songs to prove their talent and gaing a following before uploading original content. The downside is that in the Sea of YouTube with hundreds of millions of videos, it is a bother trying to get a few friends to view your uploaded videos so they appear closer to the top of a search query, otherwise they will be doomed to obscurity in the depths of the YouTube servers.
So folks, there you have it. If you want to launch a music career online, I'd suggest using all three plus a publicist of some sort to get the ball rolling, like this kid (who was scoped out by Ellen DeGeneres and now has a record deal):
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.