Research Outline

Independent Pop Music Artist 2

Goals

To identify 2-3 cases of independent musicians who gained their followings via social media promotion and to provide examples of content, messaging, and evidence of their success.

Early Findings

Karmin

  • Karmin has 1.6 million Facebook fans, 297,000 Twitter followers, 228,000 Instagram followers, and 1.5 million You Tube subscibers.
  • Karmin has become one of the most popular duos in the market appearing on the cover of the Rolling Stone, Ellen, and SNL, to name but a few examples. In their instance it was one video that went viral that propelled them to success.

Pros and iCons

  • This group realized the importance of social media from the start and focused their efforts on building their fanbase through the medium. Currently they have 18,000 Facebook fans, 12,500 Twitter follwers, 6,000 Instagram followers, and 4,800 Youtube subscribers.
  • They are a New York band, who recognized that social media represented the way forward in a very crowded New York music market.
  • Everything was about building their fanbase and getting their name out there when they first started out. They involved fans by asking them to be part of their first music video, played games on their Instagram, and used a range of other strategies to engage fans and get them following them and it paid off.
  • Pros and iCons has had more than 200,000 spotify streams and over 1 million video views. Their music has been used in television commercials for Jaguar.

Justin Bieber

  • Canadian superstar Justin Bieber was one of the first to gain popularity through social media after videos of him were placed on YouTube when he was 12. Scoot Braun accientally clicked on one of the videos, showed it to Usher, and the rest is history.
  • Although not an independent artist at the time of discovery, Justin Bieber is a good example of someone whose career occured, in many ways, by chance as a result of social media. He has now sold more than 105 million records in the US alone, and is one of the biggest selling artists of all time.

Summary

  • There is a considerable amount of information available regarding artists who fit the required criteria. Time constraints have limited the amount of information we have been able to present regarding the artists we identified.