‘ A FEW YEARS AGO NEW MUSICIANS PROMOTED THEMSELVES VIA
‘MYSPACE’ NOW ‘MYSPACE’ IS REDUNDANT.
YOUTUBE IS THE PRIME PLATFORM FOR MUSICAL ARTISTS TO PROMOTE THEMSELVES
AND THE SUCCESS OF ‘GANGNAM STYLE’ PROVES THIS’ AGREE OR DISAGREE?
Once upon a time, Myspace was the social networking site ideal for up and coming musicians. Just as Twitter is now, Myspace used to be the most popular platform for teenagers to create a webpage to express themselves. It allows you to share videos and mp4 music on your profile, which is why it is ideal for amateur musicians to promote themselves. Many have been noticed through this platform and Colbie Caillat is just one of them.
Colbie Caillat - Bubbly:
The popularity of Myspace has decreased rapidly since 2008, just as YouTube made its debut. Some may even state that Myspace is now redundant, where it once had over 100 million global users, its UK audience has halved to 3.3 million monthly visitors in July 2010 (Telegraph). Compared to competitors, Myspace is failing by 2004 when Facebook was launched. Facebook had 500 million registered users and Twitter (launched 2006) already had over 100 million users, surpassing Myspace in its peak, however these sites were only competing with Myspace as social network sites. YouTube is the platform which directly competes with Myspace as a music platform. These days YouTube is the most effective form of promotion for new artists.
We can measure the difference in value of YouTube and Myspace by the price that each was sold for to a new corporation: Myspace was sold to Rupert Murdoch in 2005 for $580 million whereas YouTube was sold to Google in 2006 for $1.65 billion. This does not necessarily mean that YouTube is the prime platform for musical artists to promote themselves, but it does show how much more it is worth, suggesting that it would be a better platform for the artists.
We can see that YouTube is a more effective platform purely through the success of the recent hit, Gangnam Style:
This spoof video went viral almost immediatley after it was released in July 2012. On September 24th the video had 262 million views and made history of the most liked video ever. The power of YouTube publicity is clearly presented here and it increases as the Korean artists went on to be signed by Justin Bieber's management, performed on a number of successful US shows and collaborated with Jill Stuart (fashion designer) to create a Gangnam inspired fashion line. Psy's success is remarkable and this would be nothing if not for YouTube. In comparison, Colbie Caillat is still relatively unknown by a large audience, whereas Psy is a global superstar after only 5 months.
The Guardian released an article about the popular song, saying that "Gangnam Style's lyrics may be in Korean, but its visuals are in clear American. It is a pastiche of pop video cliches so familiar you almost feel you know what Psy is singing." This statement proves true, and may be one of the reasons that Gangnam Style has become as famous as it is. The clear stereotypical American style of the video draws the audience in and the pop video cliche pastiche is what ultimately entertains them. Not many viewers will actually know where or what Gangnam is, yet they still buy into the performance and so passively participate in the world reknown dance that resembles a horse impression.
The video now currently has 666,395,251 views, the democratic community of YouTube also means that thousands, if not billions of fans will have made video responses or parodies of Gangnam Style. This is something that Myspace prohibits, meaning that users will generally migrate towards YouTube rather than Myspace to get a feel of community. This connects to Michael Wesch's 'Anthropoly of YouTube' which talks about cultural inversions. This basically means that users are looking to express their individualism, whist still highly valuing community. Connection without constraint is something that YouTube offers its users, whereas we could argue that Myspace is more like suburbia; everyone is in one place, but noone is really connected to much because Myspace is now disconnected from the major media platforms.
This image shows that myspace is the least active platform in terms of video viewing per day.
I would say that it is definitley accurate to state that Youtube is now the major platform in terms of music artists. Myspace is considered redundant by most web users whereas YouTube has atleast 24 hours of video uploaded and exceeds 2 billion views a day. The viral success of Gangnam style proves this idea undoubtedly, i think it is safe to say that Myspace has seen its peak, leaving YouTube as its succesor in playing a major role in the music industry.
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