The days of an artist continuously, if ever, going platinum and multi-platinum are behind us, but that doesn’t mean the people aren’t listening. Existing and emerging platforms continue to help shape the music business every day. Take for instance a young new hip hop artist out of Pittsburgh who at the tender age of 19 has over 135,000,000 YouTube Views on his channel… and he is not signed to a major label, but has stayed loyal to his independent label Rostrum Records.
How did he do it? Social Media. Branding. Engagement.
Mac Miller has followed suit from those who have just recently come before him and dove head first into the Internet. Releasing his entire music collection to date for free and relying heavily on social media to gain fans. For every 100K followers Miller receives he has put out a free song on his #road2amillion twitter followers. Surpassing 1,000,000 fans on Facebook and gaining a majority of the YouTube views in under 1 year is no easy task even for the biggest social media beast.
His biggest video, “Donald Trump,” has 26,085,243 views.
Even The Donald himself eventually had to put in his two cents. As powerful as Donald Trump is, the video commenting on Mac Miller has about 100,000 more views then all of his other YouTube videos.
This isn’t about videos going viral. Connecting with people is what resonates with me. Miller has branded himself while not letting the conversation between him and his fans become one-sided. He continues to stay engaged with people all over the world (currently on a sold out tour in Europe… independently and still 19 years old.) His fans have been made to feel a part of something through his tweets, music videos, and the brand he has built instead of just consumers of the music. At any given moment people are commenting on his videos and tweeting about him, the fans have been engaged with what he has built. Relevant blogs continuously post content. The more content that is out there the more successful the online presence has become, but the content is fine-tuned and ready to be live, it is planned and well put together.
How does this relate to your brand? Carefully construct your social media strategy, spend time gathering content that your consumers will have a reaction over. Make it so good it will leave them wanting more. Engagement is a word all too often thrown around a room full of marketers, but sometimes the message doesn’t get through because the content is too dry to move anybody. In the 1960’s Howard Gossage said, “The real fact of the matter is that nobody reads ads. People read what interest them, and sometimes it's an ad.” The same holds true today, people still engage with the things in their lives that move them… and sometimes it’s a brand.
Previous Post 
