Music is a big passion of mine. Big deal though, right? That's hardly rare for people, especially us "Digital Natives". What intrigues me most is how the love of music has grown over the past few generations. Of course there were always those who loved music whole-heartedly many, many years ago. But there seems to have been an explosion of music-lovers lately, and I have a hunch about why that is.
How do we find music? Back in the day, there was radio. You heard a song you liked, bought the record, maybe saw the artist live, fell in love, and so on. How many other ways were there to find out about new music? Slowly, as technology developed, there was Television, Computers, and then Internet. All of these making it slightly easier to catch onto the trends, find out what music is hot and what to listen to. Now...we don't even think twice about how to search for music. In fact, if someone next to you is singing the lyrics to a song you've never heard, you immediately think, "How did I miss this?! Why haven't I heard this song?" And all you have to do is look down at your touch-screen phone, do a quick search and, boom - you have it downloaded. The reason we feel blindsided when we don't know a song is because we have so many channels throwing "trending" things into our faces at all times. Through social media networks, we can find out in a matter of seconds what the most popular song is of the day, or who the biggest new rising star is. I log into Facebook and see about 5-10 links to songs and music videos on any given day. I go onto my Twitter news feed and I actually get to see the artists I love tweet about their new music. If not from them, from my own friends. I think to myself, "What is 'Wrecking Ball' and why have 18 of my followers tweeted about it in the past hour? Well, it's getting a lot of reactions out of people so I better listen to it so I can chime in". We feel left out if there is something happening in the world that everyone is talking about besides you. Whether or not the music we find is any good, it is now popular.
So that is the basis of how social media has affected me as a listener. What I want to know now, is how social media has affected musicians themselves. Is this all a good thing? Is social media doing nothing but furthering musicians' careers? Are there any negatives? How much does it really affect them and their music?
