Post 2: The Role of the Internet in the Music Industry

Every artist/ band uses the internet to market their brand. Therefore they may synergise their brand via music, merchandise,social media and sponsorships. Artists use digital convergence to market themselves which allows them to grow fans but also allows fans to feel as if they are more connected to the artist. Social media often pays a pivotal role in this as the artist can use exclusive content, sponsorships and hyperlinks to promote themself.  Artists have pages on instagram and twitter aswell as having websites designed to promote the artist.

Khalid: 

Is a pop star with a big online presents clearly shown by his 7.8 million followers on Instagram. On his instagram you can clearlly see that he uses mainly bright colours and that the  light blue is on most of his posts.

The first thing that I noticed was that his website consisted of very bright colours and  had a clear colour scheme of lime green, blue and grey. The website has a lot of visual content for instance videos and pics of Khalid which is a convention of a website. As soon as you enter the homepage the 1st thing that you can see is a his latest music video with clickable what now button, this is another convention of an artist's website as websites are often used to promote the latest single. 

At the top of each page there is a navigation bar, this allows the user to easily navigate between pages, this clearly is a convention of a website. Khalid's website has a section where it says "follow" and has Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Spotify and apple music icons all these icons are hyperlinked to his social media accounts. This shows convergence between his media products. Something, that is missing from Khalid's website is a sense of community. For instance, there is a section where the user can sign up to a newsletter but there's only a join button there are no hashtags and there's no call to action for example "become a free spirit." This is an area which I would to improve on in comparison to Khalid's website. In terms of industry, the website refers to Sony Music as the record label. As the footer of each page there is the RCA logo, which is a subsidiary of Sony Music, there is a sentence saying " Sony Music Entertainment. All Rights Reserved." Under this there is are hyperlinks to the Sony Music website. The website itself is one single page where the navigation bar takes the user to different places on the same page, this helps minimise the time being used to navigate the website.  The website is very eye-catching and visually appealing. The majority  of strips have different colours or different images this keeps the user interested.

Taylor Swift:

I decided to look at Taylor's Instagram page as she is a pop star with a big online presence. The first thing I noticed that despite having 122 million followers she does not follow anyone, I believe this because Swift posses star quality. Also, she shows digital convergence as her bio has a link to her music video. 

Another artist who I looked at was Stormzy, I noticed that he there is a clear colour scheme, most of the pictures have a dark theme and most of the posts have the colour black or red. There is a lot of promotional content on his feed with sponsorship with different brands for example, Time and Relentless.