Social media and the music industry, a match made in heaven?

This year’s Grammy’s were rife with the subject of social media featuring YouTube inspired collaborations and a Twitter dress. Rosie Khdir ponders the relationship between music and new media.

Products of social media

We are all familiar with MySpace being a musical platform for people wanting to show off their singing/song-writing talents and it has worked remarkably well for lots of people; just look at Lily Allen!

What is emerging now, as the spectrum of social media expands, is the tendency to broadcast everything on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube or MySpace, to achieve the much sought after status of ‘celebrity’.

In the past few years we have seen young people, such as Dutch singer Esmée Denters and the more recent Justin Bieber, reach stardom using a webcam and their own raw talent. Both singers were discovered after broadcasting their vocal abilities on the popular video site YouTube.

Justin Bieber, a sapling of a star at just 15 years old, now has a record deal with Usher’s Island Records and a platinum album in Canada.

Celebrity obsession

It isn’t only the unsigned and unknown musicians who are taking advantage of the cheap and easy features of Web 2.0. More and more people of the famous persuasion are creating online profiles and fan pages as a way of “staying in contact with their audience” (and a way of getting cheap and sometimes free marketing for their next album).

The obsession with Twitter is particularly interesting. Everyone is talking about Imogen Heap, a British singer-songwriter, who donned a “Twitdress, to this year’s Grammy Awards. Her very unique (but rather ugly, it has to be said) outfit featured a necklace which displayed her fans tweets and a handbag that showed images from Flickr.

Heap said that it was an opportunity for her fans to experience the ceremony with her and stated:

“I just thought it’d be nice for them to come with me so I’ve got a live Twitter feed from them.”

Was that really it, or was it just another attention seeking outfit with a Twitter twist?

Taylor Swift’s Grammy performance, a duet with musician and producer Butch Walker, was inspired by a YouTube viral that he posted, featuring him covering her song “You Belong With Me”.

It just seems like celebs are going mad for it!

Power to the user

The music industry these days seems to be packed with stars that have been made through consumer interaction. In the noughties we saw the emergence of a reality TV culture where viewers dictated the results of a show. Shows such as X Factor and American Idol have produced the likes of Leona Lewis and Kelly Clarkson, and their success relied on the votes of the public.

Are we now beginning to see a progression from TV to the Internet? A Facebook group was famously used in December 2009 to rally support for a number one single, yes, I do mean the famous Rage Against the Machine saga. Is this an indication of how Web users could be the new audience to play to?

As society begins to move online and music sales move with it, it seems that social media has become the music industry’s new best friend.

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Image credit: BJ Carter