Social Media's Doing Something Productive?

With the traditional way of signing artists, failing labels are going out of their comfort zone to make special deals with certain artists to promote their music.  According to the article “Independent or contract: Do musicians still need record labels like Young Money and Sony?” by Alicia Adejobe many artists are starting to become independent with the help of all teenagers favorite thing, social media.

http://www.economicmodeling.com/

Social media and the internet is helping a lot for new and upcoming artists who can release songs to YouTube and promote their music online or on Facebook because they no longer need the traditional record label contract to make it big anymore.  While it doesn’t necessarily hurt to have a label back you, it does hurt when they drop you because they simply aren’t making their preferred amount of money.  I thought this was very interesting when I was reading this article because it is saying that basically with the power of technology anyone can make it big if they are good enough.  They don’t need the label for all of their things that definitely help like promotion and bonuses.  They might need them to back them up after their career has started, but that is a much better story for the artists because they can make a more fair deal.

Certain artists though still don’t have a major record label backing them because they want more money.  While it’s very true that the record labels take a lot of their money I would think that it might help to have some support behind their back, but they feel that they don’t need it.  Macklemore and Ryan Lewis who created their own record label and officially had an indie song reach number one on the billboards for the first time since 1994 in 2013.  They didn’t need the support of a record label to take all of their money in support for some promotion.  They did it all by themselves.

Overall I found that it was very interesting to hear that anyone can make it big just because of the internet.  This makes me wonder if record labels will stop exploiting their artists just because they can and actually give them fair deals.  I think that within a few years record companies will have to change because of the way that things are with social media and other things that an artist can do themselves without the need of a record label.

Next I will summarize all that I have learned.