artist promotion
Lil Mama & The Future of Artist Promotion
Lil Mama calls herself “the voice of the young people”, and judging by her MySpace page she is definitely affluent in all the ways tweens/teens are using social networking tools to communicate.
I have been following Lil Mama’s career progression for a while now, mostly because there’s something intriguing about a young local artist who is relying on her talent rather than strictly sexual appeal to reach a global audience (and these days, would you settle for anything less than global?).*
* I feel the need to clarify this statement – For an artist trying to achieve mainstream visibility (i.e, Lil Mama doing a remix of Avril Lavigne’s “Girlfriend” – that’s pretty mainstream), building a global fan base is achievable at a much faster rate, thanks in part to the plethora of free online social media offerings.
That said, reaching billions of fans should not necessarily be the first goal on every artist’s checklist. I am definitely not undermining the value of nurturing local/micro audiences. Many people consistently perform for small-medium sized audiences across the country, and are making a living doing what they love. This is respectable, admirable, and essential to nurturing the evolution of musical genres.*
So in terms of Lil Mama, she is currently the best example I can think of, in terms of artist management, where a team is fairly comprehensively harnessing existing social media tools to SUCCESSFULLY speak the language of a new artist’s audience/rapidly growing fanbase.
Lil Mama’s MySpace page is a useful primer in what social media sites kids really use and how to best use them to communicate with an audience. Lil Mama’s team has taken two ingenious steps that I have yet to document among other artists: (let me know if you see this elsewhere among mainstream artists)
* social media site tie-ins (being featured on each site)
* Using the MySpace blog function to promote these tie-ins and encourage fans through personalized video messages to set up their own accounts with the featured site
Lil Mama’s Social Networking Tools on her MySpace page
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