Fac£book Mu$ic

So I am sat in the office, listening to the Joey Bada$$ ’1999′ mixtape and structuring together a Facebook Status Update for my own artist page when I realise that the last week or two has been dominated by talk of forcing artists to pay for their social reach. In simple terms, if I submitted a status update on my page, only 10% of my fanbase would see this post. Now if that post was for something important, like a record release for example, then that could directly affect the viral ability of the content I am trying to inform everyone about. I recently decided to try this so called paid promotion so that this article felt like less of a rant and was backed up by hard facts, I found that after I had spent £25 for ONE update about my last release, it only reached 34% of the1,108 people who ‘Like’ my page. If you want your following to notice your posts then you have to fork out, per post, which in my opinion is ridiculous.

The whole appeal with Facebook Artist Pages was that it implemented a simple yet effective way for new and emerging artists to showcase their talent to the social media masses without paying out the BIG $$$’s for marketing and PR. I myself have seen a huge fall in page engagement because of this new change that Facebook has put forward, this is also likely to affect my upcoming releases and any other updates I wish to enlighten people about, GEE THANKS ZUCKERBERG.

If the feature (I wouldn’t even title this as a feature, more of a nuisance) Facebook are clearly trying to cash in on the power they feel that they now hold over artists and creatives around the world however they are forgetting one important and fundamental rule of the big WWW…

…’When you kill the user experience, you kill yourself’.

The music industry has already shown signs of wear and tear thanks to piracy, illegal distribution and file sharing, the last thing this great industry needs is a once appealing social network platform affecting the way we all communicate with our fans.