But Dryhust and others argue that social media is shaping music in more insidious and hard-to-define ways. So it makes sense that pop is where we’d see the earliest signs music itself was being shaped by our new social media-centric reality. However, the supremacy of image over sound in music is more severe than it has ever been.” Mat Dryhurst “There are many musicians who are thriving where I would argue that the music itself is a secondary consideration, and perhaps the image is primary,” Dryhurst says. It was a meme that became a song, and its creator was a viral star who became a not-so-accidental pop star. The user was the star, while the song was used as a catchy background theme for visual gags and fun, making it both likeable and shareable. But, the promotion worked because Hill understood brilliantly how to manipulate social media’s insatiable algorithms. As ridiculous as it all might sound, “Old Town Road” just topped the Billboard Hot 100 for the 12th week running at the time of writing, overtaking Drake’s 11-week run with “God’s Plan” last February - previously the chart’s longest reign. “I promoted the song as a meme for months until it caught on to TikTok and it became way bigger,” 19-year-old Lil Nas X, real name Lamar Hill, told Time. When “Old Town Road” didn’t get much initial radio play, Lil Nas X used it to soundtrack #YeeHaw memes on TikTok, where young people dress up like cowboys and cowgirls to sing along to his song. Its creator first gained fame through viral comedy videos on Facebook, then migrated to Twitter where he rocketed to viral fame regularly. The biggest song of 2019 has so far been “Old Town Road” by Lil Nas X. And at first glance, it might seem obvious why. “It obviously is,” philosopher and digital artist Mat Dryhurst says. But one question has so far gone largely unanswered - is social media changing music itself? It’s shaping how we listen to music, how we pay for music and how music reaches us. It’s influencing how artists are booked and who gets the most bookings. We’ve watched as it has influenced everything from political outcomes, political discourse, how we connect with one another and how brands and corporations connect with us.Īnd as I touched upon in the first article in this series, social media is also greatly changing the music industry. It’s uncontroversial to suggest that social media is changing society. In part one, we analysed how changes to Facebook have forced artists to migrate to platforms like Instagram, where image is everything, and how artists are exploiting these changes for gigs and sponsorships. This is part two in our conversation around the impact of social media on electronic music, which explores how social media may be changing music itself.
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