HOW IS MUSIC MARKETED?

THE TOP FOUR MOST POPULAR MODERN METHODS OF MUSIC MARKETING.

SOCIAL MEDIA Music is heavily marketed through the use of social media. Most

upcoming bands/artists have their own profiles on various social media sites. Links to new releases and where to purchase them is made much easier for artists to publicise.

In some cases, social networking sites/apps such as Facebook and Twitter also enable artists to release short previews of releases as well as teaser music video trailers etc. before the official release which then creates a ‘hype’ as people begin to share and talk about the product.

Drake used social media to his advantage and tweeted a short preview of his, at the time, new song “child play” which got over 500,000 people tweeting about the clip online significantly increasing the number of pre-orders by 70 %.

TELEVISION (MTV)

Television channels, such as MTV and VH1, are still highly popular ways to market music to very broad and varied audiences. Now running for the full 24 hours and being watched my an estimated 1.2 million people an hour, there's no question why they're a popular method for musicians to promote their new single or album.

A band or artist’s new single/music video can be displayed and often premiered on these channels, something which originated in 1981 when MTV aired its first music video, ‘Video Killed the Radio Star.’

Previewing a band/artist’s new singles on air increases the likelihood of the viewer to buy their album or single to keep.

MAGAZINES Magazines come at a price, but are on average highly successful as a music

marketing method. Various magazines, includingTop Of The Pops, have designated pages for the advertisement of new music, where, for a fee, artists can advertise for their newest releases or upcoming tours.

Magazine advertisements are becoming more and more limited in their audience, due to a young and modern audience being more associated with social media. Comparatively, nowadays very few people still buy magazines and read them, so there is therefore a much more limited audience which will see the advert and meaning that magazine marketing is arguably not the most successful when compared to other methods of marketing, such as Youtube.

Because of this, music marketing in magazines is starting to become far less conventional due to the rapidly increasing success of social media sites and the far cheaper ability to allow the audience to share around the advert on the band’s behalf – rather than spend fortunes on promoting a magazine advertisement.

YOUTUBE The worlds second largest social networking website, YouTube, is one of the biggest, modern

forms of music marketing. With every minute more than 100 hours of video are uploaded with an estimated 49 hours of such being music based. The success, as a marketing site for music, is aided by YouTube’s number of users, standing at over a billion, which all influenced the crashing of the YouTube servers when the music video Gangnam Style, a viral music video viewed by one in seven people across the globe, received the greatest amount of views within an hour of its uploading than any other viral video on the site.

This is still a fairly new and modern form of music promotion and marketing, with YouTube only becoming available for music publishing in 2003.

An increasingly significant number of upcoming and current bands/artists use YouTube to share and promote their music singles, videos and albums by uploading their music videos singles via Vevo the Youtube music publisher where videos get an average of 100,000 views.

YouTube is a modern way to market music and has shown to be a successful way to do so with artists single sales increasing by nearly 32% when the music video is released onto Youtube.