Whether it’s local music or national music, seems like all bands and artists have joined the social media bandwagon. All musicians & bands seem to have their own official website, blogs, twitter, facebook, etc. In the past, myspace used to be a big hit with music, but people are no longer interested in myspace anymore. These days it’s all blogs, twitter, and facebook when bands are promoting themselves.
What is it about everyone joining the social media bandwagon?
Not only that it’s an easy way to promote yourself like your gigs, project announcements, etc. Bands & artists see it as an opportunity to interact with their fans in a more personal way. Bands have been chatting back and forth with their fans in social media pages lately.
Back in the 50’s, 60’s, 70’s, and even the 80’s, when there was no internet around, it made music promoting a lot harder. Back in those days, you had to use flyers to hang in town and mailing lists by regular mail if you wanted to promote your music. Newspapers and magazines were also used to promote music in those days. Today, it seems that music promoting is much easier.
I’m not trying to sound negative, but I’m going to be honest here. I think the internet pretty much killed the music business. Nobody is buying records anymore because of it. Everyone is doing everything online these days.
It seems that more bands are getting record deals because of the internet but is that a good thing? No, not really. I miss the old days of music when the A&R guy used to go to a band show and just sign a band to a major label because he/she likes their music, that’s how it used to be done in the old days, but it’s not like that anymore. These days labels sign bands based on their popularity alone, not caring if their music is good or not.
I miss the old school ways of promoting music and wish it was still like that. I know I’m sounding like a hypocrite, that I do this social media thing myself, but I do it because everyone else is doing it. I’ll never forget the quote from John Mellencamp, “I think the internet is the most dangerous thing invented since the atomic bomb.”, or something like that.
It’s easier for bands online to make themselves look popular when in reality, a lot of them are nothing. Bands have been releasing free music to the internet like what Radiohead have been doing as of late and a lot of bands have been making their own youtube videoblogs.
Self publicity is great, don’t get me wrong, but I believe the internet has taken the love of music away from bands & musicians itself. Social media has certainly changed the way we all look at music, but honestly, it didn’t help, it only makes the music business much much worse.
Kev
K'Brocking 
The social media part of the Internet is good. Filesharing is what killed the album. Then you got things like iTunes where people can choose to buy nothing but a band’s single, and that is what they often do. (The irony is that most bands these days don’t have any good songs EXCEPT FOR THE SINGLE.) I can remember the year 1995 when I was taking Chinese at SUNY Albany. I had a test, which I rushed through and probably could have gotten a higher score on…if it weren’t for the fact that I wanted to get it over with so I could run over to the music store and buy a copy of MELLON COLLIE AND THE INFINITE SADNESS on its release date. (By the way, I bought a copy of it from a record store in Colonie Center called Tape World, which was right across from a bookstore called WaldenBooks.) Then I did the same thing they day ADORE and MACHINA came out: went to the store on release date and bought it. Thanks to the Internet, I can no longer have that thrill because there aren’t any record stores left! Even the big boys like FYE are going under thanks to the internet. One of the only holdouts is Last Vestige, which is awesome because not only is it a record store, but it’s an independent one to boot!