Social Commerce Might Help Musicians Overcome The Lack Of Live Music During The Pandemic

Independent artists and labels alike know exactly how important it is to have your Instagram profile and content on lock. Artists hoping to get discovered know that their Instagram serves three distinct purposes:

• To engage with the current fanbase
• To attract and convert potential fans
• To attract and convert music industry executives, agents, producers, etc.

Each of these requires different actions in order to be successful, making Instagram and other social media platforms a popular topic of discussion and sometimes, heated debate, amongst musicians and marketers.

However, there is a new purpose for Instagram that has been gaining prominence over the past couple of years: selling products to fans. Facebook and Instagram released a bevy of e-commerce features native to the apps themselves, allowing businesses and entrepreneurs to easily integrate their product catalogs with their social profiles. Of course, this means that musicians can sell their physical music and merchandise through their Instagram profiles. One major benefit of these features is that musicians no longer need to worry so much about how they are going to get users from their Instagram to their website to buy a shirt. Another benefit is that social proof is easy to accomplish through the use of influencer marketing.

These features also exist at a time in the music industry where most artists make very little money from the streams/listens of their music and instead make the majority of their income from live events, merchandise, and synch licensing (the use of music in visual media such as films or TV shows). Not to mention that, due to COVID-19, live events are essentially non-existent and visual media production has been significantly reduced.

Despite the currently rough economic outlook for working musicians, there are some positive forces at work as well. Most people are sitting at home and bored, which has lead an increase in both music streaming (Yeung, 2020) and social media usage (Singh, Dixit & Joshi, 2020). Additionally, the vast majority of citizens in developed countries have received stimulus checks from their federal governments, which were specifically designed to be put back into the economy through consumer spending. Therefore, people are more likely to be paying attention to independent artists and they are likely to have some disposable income they wouldn't mind spending on the right item.

I know for myself, if I'm following an artist on Instagram, I like seeing the new products they release and having easy access to them right from the app. I'm curious to know whether utilizing these features has an impact on the algorithm or brand perceptions, because I noticed that many big artists (ex. Billie Eilish, Drake, The Weeknd) do not use this feature on their profiles. Do they know something we don't?

References

Singh, S., Dixit, A., & Joshi, G. (2020). “Is compulsive social media use amid COVID-19 pandemic addictive behavior or coping mechanism?. Asian Journal of Psychiatry.

Yeung, T. Y. C. (2020). Did the COVID-19 Pandemic trigger nostalgia? Evidence of Music Consumption on Spotify. Evidence of Music Consumption on Spotify (August 21, 2020).