The chart has a big red arrow next to Mumford & Sons who have the third highest album sales but no Twitter account. However, there is @TeamMumfordSons a fan powered feed which has 35,249 followers presently. Simply not having a Twitter account does not mean that Twitter is not helping the band sell records. Even doing a search for “Mumford & Sons” on Twitter shows the band is at the very least getting a lot of buzz on the service.
The article’s hyperbolic posit that tweeting may be “stealing valuable time away from songwriting, gigging, collaborating, and other pursuits that form deeper audience connections,” as though an artist is going to turn down a show or the opportunity to perform with someone else due to excessive tweeting is utterly absurd. The beauty of Twitter is that it is short and brief and does not have to be an all-encompassing time waster.
The article and its chart miss many other points, like the value of Twitter in pushing deals directly to fans (no doubt many of Lady Gaga’s followers learned of Amazon.com’s $0.99 priced album from a tweet), or the fact that no one has ever said tweeting alone is a magic formula for selling albums. An artist still needs to put out a good music that their fans want to listen to and more importantly purchase, if a tweet or two helps them do that, then tweet away.
2 Responses
There was an article published yesterday about John Mayer and his thoughts on the music industry and twitter (http://www.americansongwriter.com/2011/07/john-mayer-offers-musicians-advice-at-berklee/). It was a very interesting read especially coming straight from him as he used to be such an avid twitter user.
andy – save the analysis for the pros. Or maybe write the article after looking at more then a crappy graph and three poorly written paragraphs? This is pretty much filler.