RESEARCH - How the Music Industry uses Sociall Networking Sites

Social networking websites have become a very useful way of promoting and marketing an artist. Seeing as the artists are very popular this enables direct connections with billions of fans worldwide. 

Click onto the icons to open up the website.

 Here is an example of a popular social networking website, MySpace which many artists used to use for promotion. But for the past years it has lost its recognition. Therefore recently Facebook and Twitter are the main ones, which are popular to create a fan base as it ensures the artist to share multimedia, and furthermore this enables the fans to support and interact with the artist. YouTube is another popular social networking website which successfully promotes artists as it allows YouTube users to subscribe and then they can share videos and fans from all around the world can comment, like and favourite videos.

Lily Allen is one of the more famous examples of this, although she did start of by using the dissappearing  MySpace site to build her fan base (along with Chemical Brothers and Artic Monkeys).  

Lily Allen was one of the first pop stars to emerge through social media, developing a fan base via MySpace before the release of her 2006 debut album, Alright, Still, which features the hit song "Smile." In 2005, Allen signed with Regal Recordings, though the label had scarce resources to promote her work. Allen then took matters into her own hands, posting demos on MySpace. The demos attracted thousands of listeners, and brought Allen mainstream media attention for the first time.(source: http://www.biography.com/people/lily-allen-20935273)

 "You see, Lily Allen is one of the original MySpace rockstars. While she wasn’t exactly the epitome of a struggling musician before she joined MySpace in 2005 (she already had a lowly £25,000 record deal) it was her ability to connect with and create a huge MySpace fan base that propelled her towards international stardom." (source:http://www.vanseodesign.com/social-media/lily-ann/) 

Ed Sheeran was an independent artist at the start, but he was not famous until he posted an online video displaying his various styles through sbtv.co.uk. By doing this it led the rapper Example to invite Ed Sheeran on a tour with him. Form there on Sheeran’s fan base grew via YouTube and  was gradually becoming more popular through the internet (worldwide).

Nowadays Ed Sheeran uses Facebook to promote himself and keep in touch with his fans. He posts comments, videos, pictures and links directed to his fans explaining what he has been doing; this allows the fans to be kept updated daily.

Below I have put together a collage of screen shots of Ed Sheeran's Facebook posts. They include comments, videos and website links which allows the fan base to interact with the artist.