Changing times: how social media has revolutionised the music industry

Posted on April 24, 2015 by Liam Walsh

It is a matter of years since music was generally only available in various physical forms such as CDs, or online in a select few places such as Napster. We have now reached the stage where music is available in a myriad of locations across the web and social media has certainly played its part in bringing the music industry to where it is now, therefore opening up a potential market for a social network like miXXerS.

The advent of social media has opened up an entirely new platform where artists can promote their music to a wide range of people, fans and potential fans alike. Artists can link fans to new music, inform them of upcoming music as well as promote any upcoming live events they may be performing at. We are at a point where you will likely hear any news about your favourite artists on social media before you hear or see it anywhere else. Features like Twitter’s trending topics highlight any recent news that has generated a lot of talk over social media. A big announcement from a music artist is likely to end up on this list. Outside of the music they produce, artists are able to promote themselves by interacting with their fans, something which social media has enabled on a much greater scale.

Case Study: Spor

Spor, the alter-ego for UK based drum and bass producer Jon Gooch, was created in 2006, taking the electronic music industry by storm. After a lengthy hiatus, Spor returned to the scene in February, immediately announcing his new and long awaited album, and sending drum and bass fans into a frenzy all over social media. Moving away from the traditional approach of releasing an album, Spor announced that he would be first releasing the album as a ‘pay as you want bundle’, where purchasers can choose the price they pay for the album, as a torrent through the BitTorrent bundles service. Spor further promoted his return to the drum and bass scene by doing an ‘ask me anything’ thread on the message board website, Reddit. Spor’s use of social media, from announcing his comeback and new album, to his interactions with his fans over a number of social networking platforms, enabled him to generate as much publicity and hype for his new release as possible.

Can Social Media be Dangerous?

Posted on April 22, 2015 by Yashpreet Bhangal

Social media are taking over every aspect of life. Young teenagers and older people are on social media and are well connected. Top educational and commercial organisation are heavily involve with social media. Educational organisation use social media to promote/ advertise and create a fan base and commercial websites are used in order to promote their products, provide customers with vocational deals and offer and to advertise. Social media such as facebook are used a lot by university students for group assignments and to socialising, but everyone seems to forget that every coin has 2 sides to it. While people are using social media to its full potential and gaining benefits from it, there are also people who have suffered heavily because of social media.

In the businesses sector organisations are attracting many customer by advertising on social media, but there are organisation who are suffering a lot because of this. For example news channels. Currently the news are feeling under threat as social media are becoming the platform and primary source of news. Even though TV is still the most popular form by which individuals are retrieving news the figures also clearly shows that online social media is catching up with news channels, which can be seen as a hazard by new channels (Quartz.,2015). Whereas social media could be used to promote a business it can really affect the reputation of the company. In 2012, a Korean american women who visited Papa Johns in New York discovered that the sales assistant identified her as a “Lady chinky eyes” she tweeted about this experience and local newspaper published that as a news. Within a few days the news travel from one part of the country on to international level which resulted in giving an organisation bad reputation. (Park.j.,Chaa.M.,Kim.H.,Jeong.j.,2012).

Social media can be very harmful for individual as well as they waste hours daily on social media “socialising”. Privacy is another issue which has been highlighted via many academics and individuals on social. Privacy is definitely something worth considering for individual and social media designer of future. Social media platform do have the potential to reveal confidential information of individuals without their knowledge. uploading inappropriate images and status about work placement can also get individuals in a lot of trouble, some can even end up loosing their jobs. Social media platforms have been blamed repeatedly for cyber bullying over the course of years. Once again uploading images or personal/confidential information regarding individuals on social media can be extremely heartbreaking. Teenagers have committed suicide due to these incidents in the past.

A lot of fake information is also floating around on social media so if you read something, do not believe it immediately. People can use platforms such as Facebook and Twitter in order to create fake profile to harass people. Certain cases can been confirmed where social media website were to conduct social engineering tasks in order to hack confidential information of the organisation. Cases related to music industry as also came forward when the song which was not released yet was published on social media website, which is currently effecting the music industry a lot.

Nevertheless the choice is yours on how you want to use the social media, it can be a great way to social and share information but it could also ruin your life if not used appropriately.

References:

Quartz.,2015. The unstoppable rise of social media as a source of news. Available from: http://qz.com/388418/the-unstoppable-rise-of-social-media-as-a-source-for-news/ [Accessed on 22nd april 2015]

Park.j.,Chaa.M.,Kim.H.,Jeong.j.,2012.Managing Bad News in Social Media: A Case Study on Domino’s Pizza Crisis. Available from: http://www.academia.edu/2428819/Managing_Bad_News_in_Social_Media_A_Case_Study_on_Domino_s_Pizza_Crisis [Accessed on 22nd april 2015]

What is Social Media?

Posted on April 22, 2015 by Yashpreet Bhangal

Social media, Social media, Social media!!!!

What is this social media and why everyone is always talking about this. Social media is a website, an application or a platform where people can share contents which included pictures, video’s, musics, share similar internet, exchange information on certain topics. Social media is a platform where people feel connected with each other, even if they do not know each other personally. There are hundreds of social media website floating around on internet but there are only few which has literally “broke the internet”. Social media websites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram seem to be like limbs of human beings these days. It has no limits. Recently this platform has been used by many organisations across the globe in order to keep close contact with their customer, so customers feel more connect to the organisation. Platforms such as Facebook and Twitter are like top of the agenda for many global business as they can interact with individual from anywhere across the globe without inconvenience through these platforms.

Board members of top organisations, consultants are always looking for new social platform which could be used by their business in order to gain more profit. Having so much information knowledge and interest in social media there seems to very little understanding regarding the term “Social media”. With the help of this post i would like to gain attention of my peers who are working on similar project regarding the different between social media and related concept on web 2.0. In order for us to fully understand this concept, we will have to travel back in time when the foundation on social media was laid in 1979 and a big thing called “social media” was created on top this foundation 10 years later. The first social media website was known as “Open diary” which was created in 1990s. Due to the tremendous change in the speed of internet and popularity in the concept of blog writing, in 2003 a social platform name “myspace” was born.

Let’s talk a little bit about web 2.0 now. web 2.0 actually came into existence in 2004 around the same time Facebook was born and this is where the confusion took place. Term web 2.0 was used by academics and researcher in order to describe new ways of utilising the world wide web. This was an era where application and programs weren’t just created by individual but the whole community took part in the process in order to make continuous improvements. Blogs and wikis are the best examples of web 2.0 are often confused with “social media platforms”. In order to use web 2.0 an individual doesn’t have to go through any special training and there aren’t any specific update which are require to use this facility but functionalities such as AJAX, Adobe and RSS are requirements for using the service to its full potential.

Kaplan.A.,Haenlein.M.2009.Users of the world, United! The challenges and opprotunities of social media. Avaliable on : http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0007681309001232, [Accessed on 10th april 2015]

Technology and Social Networks

Posted on April 17, 2015 by chang

Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instant messaging, Video conferencing, Web meetings: These and many other collaboration and social media platforms are now an everyday part of people’s lives around the world. Why this phenomenon happened?

1. People want to change the traditional ways of communicating and chase new and interesting forms.

2. The Internet makes these kind of instant communication possible via social media

3. Computers and smart phones have become necessary things in our life.

How does social media makes our lives different?

1. Building a new culture

2. Making the communication more efficiently

3. Providing more interesting learning experiences

4. Sharing personal opinions

5. Changing traditional way on finding jobs

So, we want to build a new social network including these features to improve people’s lives. What we want to build is a website for musicians/DJs and party information. With respect to DJs, this is a musical subculture; it is an important part of a party. Second, we will provide a platform for DJ culture lovers to communicate. Third, you will learn more about DJs musicians and music through our website. Fourth, you can make your comments in particular zone. Fifth, we provide party information. If you are a DJ, you can find a job through the site.

Because the social networks are based on modern Internet, different new technologies will shape the features of social media. According to the related articles. These technologies shape social networks:

1. Arduio

2. RFID Tags and Transponders

3. Geomagnetic Sensors in Mobile Devices

4. Optical Pattern Recognition and Augmented Reality

5. OpenID,OAuth and Identity Graph

6. Mind Reading

7. Natural language processing

We could adopt these technologies, but we do not have to. Depending on the design of our social network we will adopt the appropriate technology.