Study Supports Claims That Social Media Drives More Sales For Artists

By: Talha Bhatti  |   December 8th, 2012   |   Business, News, Social Media

A new study by Next Big Sound shows that artists that utilize social media have higher album sales. The data suggests that there is a correlation and that with “38% of musicians, Facebook views had a significant effect on album sales.” This is a lot more significant than the song being played on the radio. Interestingly, the impact of Vevo, YouTube and SoundCloud was also significant on sales for an artist.

 

An artist’s website was also found to be a great driver of sales for digitally downloadable music. The Next Big Sound data showed that 52% of artists got more album sales if they had more site views and 54% of artists saw the same correlation for singles.

 

The study also revealed that having a large fan following Facebook is not enough to generate more sales. Artists needed to interact with their audience an fans to get a positive bump from the social network. The study showed that artists with more Facebook page views had more album sales while Facebook likes did not have the same strong effect on sales. Another interesting driver of sales was an artist’s Wikipedia page and the more views it had the more albums were sold.

 

Streaming music site Spotify was not part of the study but a competitor Rdio showed that it was behind digital single sales for 17% of artists in the study. MySpace also kept its downward trend and the data showed the once popular site less significant in driving sales than other newer social media channels.

 

The study shows that artists should keep their social media presence active and engage their audience in order to gain benefits from their efforts. Fans want to know about their favorite bands and just like any brand the artist needs to keep information about the music and songs available to keep buyers downloading music.

 

Source: ReadWritePlay