Platforms are an important resource for musicians who want to promote their work and engage their audiences.
When it comes to promoting your music online (as distinct from distributing it online), there are some points of differentiation between platforms. This blog considers four of the major platforms and identifies some relative strengths and weaknesses of each.
YouTube is the second largest of the social media sites with a significant UK presence – 35% of the UK population are active users – so it has a wide potential reach for UK musicians. There is also a strong community aspect to YouTube with the ability to include full text descriptions with linked external content plus the usual features of channel subscription, comments and likes all present. These are useful in building a following. But additionally, there is an ability to curate your own playlists and you could build a list that features popular tracks relevant to your genre but include a couple of your own recordings within it.
A weakness of the platform is that the sheer volume of material on it can make getting noticed difficult. Each minute, more than 500 hours of video gets uploaded to the platform. This is partly mitigated by the strong search capability, but it does mean that the choice of keywords and other search engine optimisations are critical.
The platform is very focused on video content and really doesn’t lend itself to other content types. The overhead in producing videos means that frequent spontaneous posts are not really viable for YouTube.
Facebook is the largest of the social media platforms, used by 66% of the UK population, so it has the largest potential audience for your message. It is relatively easy to build a Facebook presence using a page for your music, that supports a wide variety of content formats. It is possible to post a variety of candid and high production material to give a sense of you and your work, and to maintain an active presence without a lot of preparation effort.
On the flipside, growing a following organically is becoming harder on Facebook. Organic posts are not served to particular target audiences so there is an element of chance whether the people who see your messages are the ones who are pre-disposed to your genre. The solution might be to fund some paid advertising but that can be expensive.
Teens and young adults are a shrinking demographic on Facebook, yet that is a significant audience for new music. If that is your audience demographic then Facebook might not be the most important platform to target.
In contrast to Facebook, Instagram is favoured by a younger demographic. Of the 30.6 million UK Instagram users, 30.1% are aged 25-34 and 26.1% are in the 18-24 age group. It is an obvious platform to target for musicians releasing new popular music. It is a very visual platform and provides an easy way to capture images and videos and publish them online, giving an insight to your musical activities and other aspects of your musical journey that your audience might find interesting. It is also very straightforward to cross post to Facebook and Twitter so keeping your social media updates consistent across platforms.
Instagram, does have some areas of weakness to be aware of when promoting music. By default, it scrolls with the audio turned off. If you are using it to promote a new song, you might need to caption a video to encourage people to turn the sound on. The volume of advertising and sponsored posts on Instagram is quite high – perhaps one for every 4 or 5 organic posts that people view. That means that people could be distracted by other paid content before they view your message or are discouraged from browsing because of the advertising.
Twitter is the final platform for consideration. It provides a platform for people to express thoughts, feelings, ideas and its credibility is enhanced by the presence of Heads of States, Celebrities and other public figures. Music is a favourite followed topic and 8 of the top 10 followed accounts are musicians. It can be useful to musicians who want to promote new releases, or performances and it provides a way to get people talking about your music. Tweets can trend on the platform, following an exponential growth curve of quotes and retweets if the topic is interesting. It might also spark interest from labels or potential collaborators.
Twitter profiles also rank highly in Google search results, so it is worth giving attention to the contents of your bio and the hashtags you include.
A relative weakness of Twitter is the size of the audience – Twitter is the smallest of the platforms considered here with 206 million monetizable users globally, of which 18.4 million are UK-based.
Twitter has had a somewhat uncertain business model for a while and has gone through extended periods of loss-making. At the time of writing, this has resulted in a takeover announcement from Elon Musk and some uncertainty around the future direction of the platform. It might be worth watching how things develop before making a big commitment to Twitter promotion.

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