Surviving as an artist in the era of social media

Sammanfattning: In the last decade or so, the marketing world has taken over the internet and with that,social media. Social media platforms sell advertisements to promoters of any kind allowingthe reach of these promotions to grow much larger than those of TV or newspaperadvertisements. To be more precise, music, and music marketing through artists and socialmedia influencers have grown significantly, which leads us to the purpose of the research.This study will provide a solid foundational understanding of the issues covered in thestudy with the help of descriptive statistics and future studies can carry on from where thisstudy left, to produce advanced statistical analysis of the matter.The purpose of this quantitative research is to find the optimal social media platform andthe type of content that is desired by the public regarding the marketing activities for music.The thesis aims to provide reasoning as well as insight to what kind of content is wantedand on which platforms is it most applicable by the social media users that listen to music.The research question addressed in the thesis is: “What are the most lucrative social mediaplatforms and content types to efficiently promote musical artists' most active social mediauser demographic?”.The research was conducted through an online survey, which was sent to over 120 peoplebetween the ages of 18 and 29 to gain an understanding of what this demographic wantsfrom the artist and the promotion. The demographic was chosen as this age group listens tomost music of adults. Another reason for the choice was the ease of receiving validresponses. The survey received 120 valid responses, fairly evenly distributed between menand women. The survey consisted of 18 questions that were designed to spot differencesbetween platforms, ages, and attitudes towards advertisements on each platform. Thesurvey had questions relating to prior research on the subject, one of which was theHoneycomb of social media (Kietzmann et al. 2011). In addition to that, other theories andprevious research were compared to see the validity of the answers as well as questionprevious results.The results of this research were quite straightforward. We conclude that Instagram is themost used platform overall and that advertising through Instagram is the most beneficialaction if one chooses to engage in social media advertising. Furthermore, the content of theposts on social media should be a combination of lifestyle, pictures of the artiststhemselves, and video clips to the music. Finally, we found that the perception of socialmedia and its advertisements are very dependent on the individual and are very subjective,however, a trend of Instagram and YouTube being superior to the others was apparent. Toconclude, music marketing on social media is seen as influential, and thus should beevaluated carefully. A combination of platforms and content types is the optimal approach,but it is important to at least include the most liked and used platforms: Instagram andYouTube.3