Indie artists haven’t forgotten MySpace’s using them to create traffic in volumes impressive enough to shmooze the big 4 record companies to partner up in a sweet deal that basically left the indie artists out in the cold. Now, American Idol contestants are getting that same feeling following a message on March 3rd received by Twitter, Facebook and MySpace followers of individual American Idol contestants:
“Thanks so much for following me/joining my Fan Page! All my updates from now on will be on our Official American Idol 9 Contestant Page, please become a fan there to read all my updates throughout the season!”
It’s not hard to speculate the real message behind the “official one,” namely, that in light of only a few of the AI contestants getting much social media attention they’re consolidating the traffic onto the AI mother ship site where it’s more important to impress the sponsors with aggregate numbers than it is to let each contestant take a grass roots approach to branding themselves and creating a direct relationship with their fans. But, that’s not surprising. AI is more concerned with skimming the revenue off the top contestants and the show as a whole than it is genuinely engaged with individual artistic branding. And, social media numbers take center stage when it comes to banking on ad dollars so AI has no qualms about erasing the individual online musical identities of its contestants to create a bigger corporate deposit slip. AI should divert a portion of its ad revenues to each contestant to fund individual artist marketing and branding campaigns as a benefit of being on the show.
Tags: American Idol, facebook, MySpace, twitter