Is Social Media Saving Music?

There's no doubting the social media explosion of the '00s had a huge impact on the artist-fan relationship. Short of being a spouse or a roommate, social network sites allowed fans unprecedented access to artists and bands. Conversely, they've permitted artists to connect and directly promote themselves, too. But even when it comes to your favorite pop star or rock band, is there such a thing as too much information? For an artist, on the other hand, how much time and energy should be devoted to blogging, Tweeting, loading up your YouTube page and updating Facebook with insightful nuggets?

"I have to limit myself to time or days when I can interact with fans," Jeremy Messersmith, a 30-year-old singer-songwriter based out of Minneapolis tells Spinner. "I do need solitude to write songs and create things. It has to do with personal boundaries." Still, Messersmith directly interacts online with 15 to 20 individual fans every day. "Most of it is via Twitter, which I update all the time. Fans will ask what a song is about or whether I have tablature for this or that. There's no way I could have done that when I was growing up with an artist that I liked." Besides updating social media sites, every Wednesday Messersmith loads his website with new content, from creating recording and show announcements to adding a b-side track for download to streaming video from, say, the recording studio. "I was a computer nerd before I was an artist, so it was natural for me to utilize it to connect to fans via Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and my own website."

"Artists are growing up in a different age of being very connected with blasts of information," says Abe Burns, who worked in digital media marketing at Epic Records before becoming an independent consultant to bands including indie rock vets Modest Mouse. "But it's really been only the last few years, starting with MySpace, in terms of it being adopted as such an important a tool."

In the early 2000s, MySpace was primarily an underground band-to-band network that exploded to become the first social networking platform and a fertile hunting ground for record label A&R men. Buffalo, N.Y.-based emo-pop band Cute Is What We Aim For rose to fame on the MySpace buzz band wave in 2005, but there was a downside. "We were signed six months after conception; it was nuts. Then we had to catch up and try and be good at playing the music," says singer Shaant Hacikyan. "Things happened so fast, we were so fortunate, but we didn't earn it. I felt guilty. It weighed very heavily. Instead of dealing with it head-on, I took some shortcuts." Those shortcuts included alcohol abuse, and Shaant, 23, eventually cutting himself off from music and media. "I took a leave of absence from the social media world for a year. I didn't log into a thing; I vanished. I used my phone for emergencies only and opened my laptop only for other things.

"People are abusing this beautiful tool that we have," he adds of social media. "They are overloading it. I don't want to be a part of that. Until I had something to say, until I was to the point of recovery, then it was OK to share my story. Once I got better I thought what better way to spread the word and let people know than through social media sites like Twitter."

"Tweeting may only be 140 characters, but it's important that what you write be of value," agrees Burns, 26. "Be careful of how you use it and what you give fans. Is it the content they want? When you're working with an artist or label, it's important to come up with a clear goal of what you want to get done. Every artist has a different audience and you have to know how to communicate with your audience in the right way. Some bands don't really need to have that direct thing like Twitter. It's a lot of back -and-forth and engaging, but for some bands it's better to keep a mystique and not be seen that way."

Says Hacikyan, "I still post content, but only if it's worth it. Less is more, create that curiosity."

"There's a songwriter out of New York," says Messersmith. "He'll spend four or five hours a day answering e-mails, which to me seems fairly excessive. At that point, I'd think I may as well have an office job if I'm answering e-mails for five hours a day."

Of the artist who tweets on an hourly basis, Hacikyan says, "Doesn't this person have something to do!"

What, like write a song or something?