I will be talking about how fans use social media as a tool for making their favorite artist benefit from a rumor they've spread or creating a bad rumor about the artist having bad consequences on the artist itself. I also want to mention a few things about the topic in general.
Social media is today a major meeting place for people all over the world. Uses of social media has increased in recent years. From having been used almost exclusively for communication between friends and acquaintances are now companies, organizers and even music artists and fans starting to use social media as a marketing tool.
For a record label, a new talent is only a few mouse clicks away when a video on Youtube might include a potential future superstar. An unknown artist has thus the possibility of being detected by both new listeners and professionals, either through direct exposure or through a chain of people, through which the video or the song finally reaches an influential person in the music realm. Already established artists can also use social media, for example, maintain contact with their listeners. This can be done through daily Twitter posts or pictures and videos that are posted on Facebook or Youtube. Internet and fans using social network has brought a radical change for music artists.
Social media like Facebook, Myspace and Twitter have for some time been used by fans as well as artists to make themselves known in their own means or fans to market, bring their favorite artists or degrade those who are not popular for some reason. It has been shown that through Facebook a large number of artists have fallen or risen in popularity because of fans and regular users daily posting
An example of an artist who embraced Twitter as a way to market their music is Imogen Heap. She asked he hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers for help when she would write a biography to promote an upcoming album. She received more than two thousand submissions from her fans. As thanks for their help and additional marketing, she published small sound clips in her tweets from the upcoming album at the time.
When I got assigned to the group I'm in, it was already decided that our topic on fans and social medias was gonna be about AKB48 as there are a few example of fans shaping the popularity of the group. But because I wanted to mention other things in this blog post, ill only be presenting a few things related to this girl group. What I find more interesting is how groups in general or fans today can use social medias to get them to a certain status.
Finally, an example of a fan making profit for its idol in some way are this guy who bought a whole lot of cd’s increasing the sales for his favorite group, AKB48.
Akb48 has had a lot of success from social medias with fans literally choosing who out of the 48 girls they prefer to be the next leading singer of an up and coming single and to top it off, a digital version of all the 48 members faces has been created to meet the needs of the fans and give the group even more popularity.
It is safe to say that today it lies in the hands of the fans whether an artist can do a breakthrough or not, how fast it is going to take before the breakthrough will come or how long they are going to last on the market.
