#DIGC101 Reflection Essay 2 - Music in the Era of Social Networks
‘And don’t believe me if I claim to be your friend.’ – Jarvis Cocker (Jarvis Cocker, ‘I Will Kill Again’ from the album The Jarvis Cocker Record, RoughTrade, 2006)
My personal experience using social networking sites from a musician’s perspective, as I did for the DIGC101 web project, has led me to believe that there is an enormous potential for completely unknown artists to promote music to a worldwide audience through the use of these sites. Currently it is web 2.0 site MySpace that provides the most user-friendly and effective method of doing this, which has been proven by artists such as Lily Allen (Durman 2006), and which will also be the focus of this essay. But my commitment to promoting music on social networking sites was only experimental and short-term, and therefore in this essay I will discuss how serious musicians use these sites to achieve success and promote themselves. I am also interested in what effect social networking has had on the music industry in general and what the future holds for these sites. Thus, through this essay I hope to be able to reflect on how I could have achieved greater success or what I could have done differently with my brief attempt at promoting myself as an artist on social networking sites.
Durman (2006) noted that MySpace had become ‘de rigueur for any up-and-coming artist’ at that time. This was the beginning of musicians using social networking sites to promote themselves and achieving success, a notion backed up by Lily Allen, whose song “Smile” became the highest charting single in Britain thanks to the promotional efforts of her MySpace page. MySpace had enabled the music industry to become ‘democratized’ meaning, as Beer (2008, p223) points out, that ‘anyone talented enough can chart. Perhaps then my lack of success in promoting my music on MySpace was a matter of talent.
If an already well-established artists MySpace page is studied, such as Alice Cooper’s for example, it can be seen that this platform is used as a way of communicating to fans, posting information about upcoming shows, releasing new music and videos as well as making older media available, and selling merchandise. The site is also highly customised with Cooper’s personal artwork. As of 3 November 2009 it can also be seen that this particular MySpace profile has been viewed over five million times and that the select few songs that have been made available have been played over six million times. To contrast this, a more current artist like Muse has received has received over sixty-five million plays, while my unknown band ‘Southern Cross Tattoo’ has received just over three hundred plays in the short time that it has been active.
Perhaps the important aspect of being a musician on MySpace though, is ‘friends’. Beer (2008) conducted a study on the MySpace profile of former Pulp singer Jarvis Cocker, and concluded that when someone befriends one of their favourite artists on MySpace, it cultivates their ‘perception of proximity’ or makes an ordinary person feel like they are ‘hanging with the stars’. Beer (2008, p233) notes that that MySpace makes this kind of friendship possible because of the ‘security of distance’ that social networking provides, as opposed to when he walked past Cocker at Glastonbury and ‘would not have risked opening a conversation, never mind asking him directly if we could be friends’. He then explains how social networking sites are now breaching the ‘enigmatic distance’ between us and ‘rock gods’ and that they are becoming ‘ordinary members’ of the network.
Musicians are also aided on social networking sites through the concept of ‘flickering friendships’, that is people who are friends or fans of the same artist yet have not physically met each other and are only connected through the artists profile page (Beer 2008, p231). This unlocks the possibility of a kind of “online word of mouth” in which discussions about other artists are provoked.
MySpace is not the only social networking sites available for musicians to reach their fans though; there are many other services such as Imeem and Twitter. Having become the most recent social networking site to explode into the public consciousness, Twitter is now being embraced by hundreds of famous musicians such as Slash and Liam Gallagher. Twitter also provides a number of music applications such as Twisten FM and Song.ly which offer various services such as creating music related links that direct users to GrooveShark playlists or retailers (Forde 2009).
Most social networking sites provide streaming music content to users for free; sometimes even full albums are made available depending on the artist. So, since their inception, these sites must have had some kind of effect on the music industry as a whole, particularly record companies and retailers; those trying to make the most money out of artists. However, on the subject of MySpace again and its September 2008 launch of MySpace Music, the effect is not nearly as negative as you would think. In fact, MySpace Music may actually be, as Klaassen (2008) points out, the saviour of the music industry.
The idea behind MySpace Music is that the company is attempting to create the largest online music catalogue in the world. Through luring fans to the site with the free streaming music, the company hopes that fans will ‘be enticed to buy additional products — eventually, band merchandise and concert tickets — or download songs’. In order to do this, the digital rights to the music are required and thus MySpace has made a deal with the four major record companies (Sony BMG, Warner Music Group, Universal Music and EMI) who are now equity partners in the site and receive shares in the company as well a an undisclosed cut of advertising revenue. This of course filters down to the musicians as well (Browne 2008).
Chris DeWolfe, co-founder of MySpace says ‘The idea is that people will use the playlists to personalize their MySpace page, which, in turn, boosts traffic. Think about why people go to a music service. They go to iTunes because they just want to get the songs and get out. MySpace is different. It’s like going to your friend’s house, and they have cool music playing in the background that makes the experience that much better’. Then, when a user finds a particular song they like, it can be bought via a download service created by Amazon and routed directly to iTunes or Windows Media Player (Leonard 2008).
MySpace have also introduced a way of profiting from pirated music videos uploaded to the site. The company has joined MTV and Auditude to ‘post video attribution ads when users upload content’ which give information about the video and its creator. Auditude has a ‘database of 250 million videos from 100 channels and the company can detect when the copyrighted, or “fingerprinted,” material appears on MySpace’. The three companies have agreed to split the revenue from the ads, which MySpace anticipates will be quite substantial, claiming to host over 80,000 videos with 75,000 people visiting the site each month (InformationWeek 2008).
All of these claims made by MySpace sound extremely promising, both for users and musicians, as well as for record labels to gain back revenue lost in CD sales over the past few years. But, as Starr (2008) asks, the big question really is can MySpace Music possibly succeed? DeWolfe is confident, saying that his companies 300 ad salespeople will have no problem selling ads and that, in relation to the fact that MySpace offers entire catalogues of free music streaming, ‘people will still need to buy tunes to play on their iPods’.
Leonard (2008) is not so quick to agree on the matter of advertising, pointing out that MySpace need to ‘charge $10 for every 1,000 ad impressions just to break even’. However, according to media buyers as the company has declined to comment itself, MySpace has only been able to charge $3 per 1,000 due to overwhelmingly large social networking ad inventory currently on the market. David Caldwell, CEO of Imeem, another ad-supported music social networking site, also thinks that MySpace are ‘setting the bar too high’ and ‘making a leap of faith by pushing free music’. He goes on to state how difficult it is going to be for anyone to replace lost CD sales. Andrew Dubber, a media strategist for New Music Strategies makes a final point about MySpace Music that ‘no matter how well it integrates purchasing, it doesn’t do what iTunes and Amazon are very good at, and that’s the activity of shopping’ (Starr 2008).
Starr (2008) also points out more flaws in the new MySpace Music platform. Firstly it has no recommendation system to encourage users to stay on and explore other artists. Most its competitors such as iLike, Pandora, last.fm and Imeem do use this one of these systems. On top of this, perhaps most significant of all, MySpace does not delete fake profiles. This opens up a whole world of spammers and hackers, which in 2007 took over Alicia Keys’ profile and gave fans a virus when trying to install a codec in order to view her latest video. Not conducting ‘ID checks’ also allows bands to artificially inflate their play counts and number of friends through the use of ‘bots’ and software such as ‘friendadder’.
So did I make the right choice in trying to achieve superstardom through MySpace? Obviously social networking sites are only one way that successful artists promote themselves, and only in very rare cases does an artist achieve celebrity status solely through the use of them. From both the primary and secondary research that I have conducted, it appears that the music industry is still as confusing and risky as it has ever been and that, to achieve success in the financial sense, immense talent and hard-work is still required as it always was. Neither of these qualities was really evident in my web project, and although social networking sites have provided artists with a tool of incredible potential in terms of connecting to people all over the world, they are not and never will be a get-rich-quick scheme for either artists or record labels. Starr (2008) sums it up best by stating ‘if you need to check out a few free songs from some random band you’ve never heard of, there’s still no substitute for visiting MySpace-and no way for Murdoch’s company to monetize its most valuable asset’.
References
Beer, D 2008, ‘Making Friends with Jarvis Cocker: Music Culture in the Context of Web’, Cultural Sociology, vol.2, pp223-241, accessed 3/11/2009, http://cus.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/2/2/222
Browne, D 2008, ‘MySpace Music Takes on iTunes’, Rolling Stone, accessed 3/11/2009, http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/23356455/myspace_music_takes_on_itunes
Durman, P 2006, ‘Singer Lily Allen shot to stardom through MySpace’, Sunday Times, 9/7/2006, p.5, accessed 3/11/2009, http://find.galegroup.com.ezproxy.uow.edu.au/itx/infomark.do?contentSet=IAC-Documents&docType=IAC&type=retrieve&tabID=T001&prodId=AONE&userGroupName=uow&version=1.0&searchType=BasicSearchForm&source=library&docId=CJ147978295&Z3950=1
Forde, E 2009, ‘Music embraces the Twitter revolution’, Music Week, 3/7/2009, accessed 3/11/2009, http://search.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.uow.edu.au/login.aspx?direct=true&db=buh&AN=39143656&site=ehost-live
InformationWeek, 2008, ‘MySpace, MTV Monetize Pirated Videos’, InformationWeek, 3/11/2008, accessed 3/11/2009, http://find.galegroup.com.ezproxy.uow.edu.au/itx/infomark.do?contentSet=IAC-Documents&docType=IAC&type=retrieve&tabID=T001&prodId=AONE&userGroupName=uow&version=1.0&searchType=BasicSearchForm&source=library&docId=A188327719&Z3950=1
Klaassen, A 2008, ‘Can MySpace’s grand experiment help save the music industry?’, Advertising Age, vol.79, no.34, p80, accessed 3/11/2009, http://find.galegroup.com.ezproxy.uow.edu.au/itx/infomark.do?action=interpret&docType=IAC&contentSet=IAC-Documents&Z3950=1&searchType=BasicSearchForm&type=retrieve&tabID=T001&prodId=AONE&docId=A185305701&source=library&version=1.0&userGroupName=uow&finalAuth=true
Leonard, D 2008, ‘MySpace Sets Music Free’, Fortune, vol.158, no.6, pp31-33, accessed 3/11/2009, http://search.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.uow.edu.au/login.aspx?direct=true&db=buh&AN=34909126&site=ehost-live
Starr, K 2008, ‘Can MySpace Music Possibly Succeed?’, The Village Voice, vol.53, no.13, p.70, accessed 3/11/2009, http://proquest.umi.com.ezproxy.uow.edu.au/pqdlink?did=1573801091&Fmt=6&clientId=20901&RQT=309&VName=PQD
