Monday, November 9, 2009

Twitter the New Myspace for Music?


Purpose

For my social media project I made myself a Twitter account. I had heard alot about Twitter but was not sure who the target market of this social media's purpose was, or how it had differentiated itself from the masses of other social media sites. The people I choose to follow were primarily musicians. I purposely choose some little-known internet based bands and some of the more popular mainstream groups. I wanted to see if these groups of musicians had figured out how to monetize themselves through Twitter.


What I Found

Unfortunately it seems like the little internet based bands were the only musicians that knew how to use Twitter. 3Oh!3, a Colorado based band I followed seemed to use the site the best of any of my followees. They sent tweets of new single releases and let all their fans know which cities they would be in next. Some of the other internet based bands seemed to use Twitter more to communicate with fans on a personal level. Kina Grannis would tweet questions for fans or report on what she did during the weekend. Interesting if you are a fan, but fairly useless. The biggest disappointment was with the bigger musicians on Twitter. Lady Gaga has tons of post, most of them irrelevant. Other big bands I followed made a Twitter account but haven't actually sent any tweets.
My suggestion to these big bands are "Stay where you know, Don't Delete Your Myspace Profile." It's the sad and unfortunate truth.


Lesson Learned

My first lesson learned was I did not have a clue how to work with my Twitter account. I managed to stumble through and find a few of the bands like I liked. A problem I ran into was that some bands, Paramore for example, have at least ten possible Paramore accounts that were set up. It was impossible to tell who was really Paramore. Another problem was the lack of users. Of the thirty or so bands I searched for there were maybe 12 I could find. Ironically when I was listening to the radio Sean Paul was being interviewed and asked if he had a Twitter account yet. He didn't really seem to know what it was but said he would have his publicist look it up. Finding followers was another problem. For the longest time I was steady at six followers. It wasn't until I fell back onto the old tried-and-true approach of emailing my twitter account to classmates that I finally ended up with 17 followers. I am not sure I will keep my account after this class.


1 comment:

  1. I agree Amber, Twitter is hard to grasp...I know that there has to be something to it, because so many people are using it. I just don't get it...yet!

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