With 584 million active users on Facebook every day, it can be hard for small-time bands to distinguish themselves in a music scene that is largely oversaturated.
“The Internet has really changed the game for independent music,” said Jack Gould, saxophonist for Sassafraz. “It’s really opened the doors so that anyone can promote a show and build a fan base fairly easily, but at the same time, it’s hard because the market is super oversaturated.”
Gould, who wrote a thesis paper tracking three Athens bands and their social media attention, said there has been a change in how bars have booked bands in recent years. Bars used to pay a flat rate and were responsible for promoting events, while the bands were responsible for providing the entertainment. But now with social media, bands are stuck carrying the weight of self-promotion.
“It has made it where the bars can say, ‘Why do I need to pay you $500 when I can just go get Joe whatever from down the street and he can bring 30 people, and he’ll play through the door?’ ” Gould said. “So you get a really backwards business model when you’re first starting out as a band. You have to bring people to get paid, but if you’re just starting out, how are you going to get people to see you?”
That business model is why many groups turn to Facebook for their self-promotion. Bands can create a Facebook page that tracks “likes,” activity and reach of the page.
In August, however, Facebook made a change to its algorithm so that views, “likes,” sharing and general activity more heavily influence what is showing up on users’ Facebook Timelines. It also added a feature in which users can pay to promote their posts so the posts are more visible to people browsing the social networking site.
“It sucks when we have 1,000 fans but when you post something, only about 10 to 20 percent are actually going to see it on their Timeline,” said Hil Hackworth of Dysfunktional Family. “The whole point of social media was to be connected to people, and now … you are no longer connected with everyone; you have to pay to be connected.”
Hackworth said that the band occasionally pays the $5 promotion fee to advertise important shows; more recently, the hip-hop group has used it to promote the release of its new album.
It’s understandable why Facebook would make this change, Hackworth said, because it is now a publically traded company, and charging promotion fees is a better alternative to having to pay for a Facebook account.
And those various new programs for promotion and advertising seem to be working: Facebook totaled $1.26 billion in revenue for this year’s third quarter, a 36 percent hike from the same quarter a year ago.
But there is more than just Facebook these days, and bands have to be proficient across all mediums of social media, said Dave Alexander of Dave Rave.
“We have this misconception that when you put something on the Internet, it’s there forever,” Gould said, “which it is there forever, but that doesn’t mean people are going to look at it forever. There are like 15 minutes from when you post and then it gets buried under a mountain of content.”
wh092010@ohiou.edu
