Communication in industry

Twitter:

Social media is a great way for musicians to promote and connect with their audiences, twitter being one of the first to gain proper traction and remain fairly popular even today is a good one to look at.

Twitter allows users to pin one tweet to their page so that is essentially the first thing people see when they look at your profile, this allows artists(like Gus Dapperton above) to promote their latest singles and albums as well as any important event or concert. It allows keeps people updated with the artist.

Twitter lets you post any type of message you want and displays it in your followers feed, Gus Dapperton putting up something like the image above lets people know he is active as a musician right now touring and it also lets them know he is doing shows which if they didn't know before increases the chances of them buying tickets.

Instagram: Similar to Twitter Instagram has been around for a while and is probably the most popular form of social media for a wide demographic. It allows you to post pictures, short videos as well as stories.

Whilst Twitter is mainly about posting tweets and updating people, Instagram solely relies on visual imagery. This is probably a large reason as to why it is more popular among younger people as it is much more interesting to see an image than read a short paragraph about what's going on in an artists life. You can be much more creative with images.

Instagram also has a feature called Stories which is essentially taking a short video and posting it to your profile and it is only viewable for a day. This makes it feel like the artist is communicating with the audience and letting them more into their lives.

Youtube: Youtube is probably the most popular form of sharing videos and creating videos on the internet right now. It is useful as it doesn't have a real limit on how long you can make a video, which gives artists the option to release vlogs showing what they do in the studio or just their day to day life. They could release a whole documentary covering the making of an album. Having this option makes youtube have the capability to connect with your audience far greater than any of the other forms of social media I have mentioned if done correctly. I believe this because a raw, unedited video of a band rehearsing a song, recording a guitar track, then mixing and mastering the track feels much more real than any post you could put up on twitter, and it gives you a proper insight to the creation process.

Youtube has also basically turned into the place you go to watch a music video, with how easy it is with modern technology to view and listen to any song or video from any point past the 50 basically people stopped watching mtv. Youtube makes watching a video so much quicker and you are also so open to any form of music from anywhere in the world making you open up your mind to new types of music.

To conclude I believe Youtube is the best place to really communicate what you're doing as an artist in terms of vlogs and documentaries but you don't see a lot of people do it as it takes a lot of effort and isn't really worth it. But when it comes down to music videos it is probably the place you can go to release them right now. You could argue that social media platforms like Instagram and Twitter are more efficient at promoting artists music as these music videos they release wouldn't be as popular without them, but I'd like to think that it's a situation where all these different forms of media sort of promote each other. People generally stumble across a spotify page or an artists music video before checking out an instagram profile, if they like the musician they'll follow them on social media. Both forms are essential.