How Social media transformed the music industry

By Lucas Hennessy

Social media trends : Music industry’s secret weapon

It’s no secret that the music industry is a profitable business. It changed a lot over the years, but the number one rule is still going: MAKE MONEY

Today the profits are coming from streams, the actual physical sales of cd’s aren’t relevant anymore. Everything’s is focused on streams, who listens to what, where and when do people listen to music and the important part of today’s topic: what creates the traffic and how can a song be played across the globe.

One thing about social media and its power is that it is a based around trends, it is unpredictable, and you always must follow them to remain relevant in the industry.

This generation of music has seen hip hop becoming the number one genre on the charts. Hip hop itself as seen a few trends over the past years, we have experienced the rise of trap music, emo rap and more recently drill music.

We can see the same process with social medias, Vine as bringing a lot of attention to new music and artist, it made some of them blew up.

Vines were 8 seconds videos where people danced and made jokes. The dancing videos made some songs and choreographies classics over the years.

See or list of songs that went from SoundCloud sleeper hits to viral dance crazes:

Young Thug – « Stoner« 

Bobby Shmurda – « Hot N*gga« 

We Are Toonz – « Drop That« 

Silentó – « Watch Me (Whip/Nae Nae)« 

Zay Hilfigerrr & Zayion McCall – « Juju On That Beat« 

Vine eventually got shut down, but it wasn’t over for the industry, since this method was working so Well artists started to bring their own so called « challenges »

As we have seen with drake and his huge hit « In my feelings » the song is a simple melodic and catchy vibe, it has probably been made for this purpose: create a challenge.

Drake being the businessman that he is has never missed an opportunity to go viral, he proves it once again with the « kiki challenge » where people dance outside of their cars while the vehicle is still moving. The challenge created a huge buzz and over 2.3 Million tweets were posted with the #kikichallencge hashtag.

This challenge was undoubtedly the best promotion Drake and his label could’ve got for the release of his album “Scorpion”

After this challenge people started to realize how much of a good money maker challenges and dance songs were. The app TikTok that was created in 2016 started to become the number one app, it was the same idea than vine but just longer videos, which was the perfect platform for dance videos.

Artists then started to make song in the sole purpose of trending on Tiktok.

K Kamp was the first artist to have a song that was meant to go on Tiktok to blow up; with his song lottery (which was later referenced as renegade because of the challenge” he make an international hit which went viral really quickly, a lot of stars actually made posts of the challenge.

Justin Bieber followed up with this marketing strategy and created his song yummy which was made to blow up on Tiktok and did which had a huge impact on the sales of his latest album.

The latest Tiktok viral song is “Toosie Slide” by Drake, with no intention on hiding the true purpose of the song the artist shared on his Instagram a video of dancers creating the dance that goes with the song before it even was released. Few days later he released the song with a video clip of himself doing the dance.

Nowadays artist don’t even hide their thirst for streams and visibility and having the n*1 spot on the charts is everyone’s top concern.

With everything happening in the world right now we can ask ourselves, what is the next trend going to be ?