Task 20: How the music industry uses social networking sites.

Artist use social networking sites as a way to promote their music as social networking sites are popular and a quick and easy way to create fans from all over the world. The most popular networking sites of today are facebook and twitter with over 250 million people having facebook and 11.5 million twitter users. Also myspace has also been a known way in which artists use to promote their new music mainly from back in the day as facebook and twitter have more of an popular fan base now in 2012. Artist use facebook as a way to connect and create with existing or new fans by creating an official page for the artist showing fans new material such as new songs, album and new music videos. Having a facebook page for an artist also allows the artist to connect with fans by fans being able to keep up with the artist by discovering whats new and current with the artist. Having a facebook page may also create new fans as existing fans have a choice of liking their page and other contents included on their page, also the chance to share new material. This then showed to friends and family which they then may decide to join.

Artist also use twitter as a way to create fans base, as twitter allows people to follow their friends, family, celebritity's and their idols. Twitter allows fans to connect with celebrities by being able to follow them and retweet their tweets and being able to see what the celebrity has been doing durring the day. Artist use this to their advantage as they use twitter to promote their new music and create new fans also they use twitter to support fellow artists.

An example of this is Wretch 32, Wretch 32 is a recent grime artist from Tottenham who realeased his first album single in January 2011:

Below are the link to his official facebook page, twitter and myspace:
http://www.facebook.com/welcomeback/requests/#!/wretch32music?fref=ts
https://twitter.com/Wretch32
http://www.myspace.com/wretchclart

To create tie ins with my artist and social networking sites to create a fan base, I would consider to create a twitter account for them as I personally feel that it is the most popular social networking site used today. I think that this is ideal as the genre of our artist is R&B soul, which is ideal to create a twitter account as it popular genre which would sure be able to create a surviving fan base.