Social Media Got You Down? Be More Like Beyoncé

By JENNA WORTHAM  NYTimes.com 9/27/1

In Gary Shteyngart’s 2010 novel, “Super Sad True Love Story,” characters carry around smart devices called äppäräts, which are something like iPhones on meth. The book is set in the near future. Staten Island is the new Brooklyn, and all the characters use their äppäräts to chat and shop and beam their lives out to the world, nonstop. Äppäräts are also equipped with a program called RateMe Plus, which constantly calculates (and broadcasts, of course) a status ranking based on users’ jobs, financials and online popularity, which is gauged by the quantity and quality of what they share. Live-streaming the most intimate details of your life is the only way to get ahead — job promotions and romantic prospects depend on it.

Shteyngart’s extrapolations from first-generation social media are beginning to prove surprisingly prescient. The biggest companies are now slaving away to bring his vision ever closer to real­ity. It’s not a philosophical or ideological statement on their part; it’s just that their business model is predicated on sharing, and finding new ways to extricate more and more from us. This spring, Facebook introduced its 1.7 billion users to a new feature called Live, which allows anyone to broadcast his or her life in a real-time stream to friends and family. The company also said it would prioritize personal posts like Live over those from brands or news organizations — a sign that, like Shteyngart, it thinks people are far more invested in voyeurism than in anything else. (And in theory, it should know.) In August, Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, followed suit with a feature called Stories, allowing users to post photos and videos that disappear after 24 hours. The company described it as a way to “share all the moments of your day, not just the ones you want to keep.”

It all feels like harmless fun, but our online lifestyles have begun to make a real impact in our offline worlds, a trend that doesn’t seem to be reversing. In 2014, Facebook talked with lenders about the possibility of linking profiles to credit scores, and one recent survey showed that 40 percent of college-admission officers now say they peruse applicants’ social-media profiles in addition to evaluating G.P.A.s and essays.

Social media has, in its own way, provided us a means of generating other selves. We just haven’t yet learned to set them free. Beyoncé has.

Social media tends to reward those who share the most — which means we tend to see way more from certain people than we want to see. You probably already know what I mean, and have seen it in your own feeds, as friends, co-workers and complete strangers faithfully transcribe their inner monologues in a never-ending stream. Even those who make a living in the public eye aren’t immune to the perils of oversharing — on the contrary. Two recent examples come to mind: Jennifer Weiner, a very successful author by any measure (her 2002 book, “In Her Shoes,” was made into a movie starring Cameron Diaz), recently wrote an embarrassingly long diatribe on Facebook blasting Oprah for not selecting her latest novel for her book club; and the rapper the Game has posted obscene, near-nude selfies on Instagram that emphasize an enormous bulge in his underwear that may or may not be Photoshopped.

There’s nothing necessarily wrong with either example — but they each clearly underline the ways that social media has stripped away our ability to tell what is O.K. to share and what is not. It’s not just that watching people vie for your attention can feel gross. It’s also that there’s a fine line between appearing savvy online and appearing desperate.

In high-definition contrast, let’s look at Beyoncé for a moment. Unless televised live performances count, she has never live-streamed a day in her life. She rarely gives interviews, so what we know is scraped from her social-media presence — which isn’t much. I can tell you what outfit and hairstyle Beyoncé posted on social media last week, but I couldn’t tell you where in the world she was, what the inside of her house looks like or even which continent her primary residence is on. Her images tend not to be location-tagged, or even look as if they were taken with a cellphone. I couldn’t tell you who took the photos of her, because, unlike most celebrities, Beyoncé rarely posts selfies. I have no idea who comes to her pool parties, if she has a pool or has ever been to a pool party. I couldn’t guess what she wears to bed. And yet, when I speak about her, it’s as if we’ve been attached at the hip since birth. I feel, very intimately, that I know her. Beyoncé’s feed is the rice cake of celebrity social-media feeds: low in caloric content but mystifyingly satisfying.

Most people treat social media like the stage for their own reality show, but Beyoncé treats her public persona more like a Barbie — she offers up images and little more, allowing people to project their own ideas, fantasies and narratives about her life onto it. Take, for example, her response after a video leaked of her sister, Solange, attacking Beyoncé’s husband, Jay Z, in a hotel elevator. Rather than posting rapid-fire tweets explaining the whole thing, Beyoncé simply posted a series of photographs of herself and her sister having fun, quelling any rumors of a rift.
Photo

The Beyoncé we follow on social media is an illusion that feels intimate and real, one that (probably) provides the real Beyoncé space to exist privately. Credit Photo illustration by Adam Ferriss. Source photograph: Larry Busacca/Getty Images.

This logic extends to her creative work too. Earlier this year, she spent an entire album, “Lemonade,” stoking rumors of marital strife with Jay Z. Lines like “You’re gonna lose your wife” seemed to confirm that her once-dreamy relationship was on the rocks. The release of that album felt cathartic, an answer to questions about her personal life that her fans had been obsessing over for months. But then, before the fervor over that album faded, news of another album leaked: this time, a duet album. With her husband. In a single calendar year, Beyoncé managed to reveal what seemed to be a lifetime’s worth of secrets and pain, without it being clear whether she had revealed anything at all. If anything, that only made people want more.

Conventional wisdom casts Beyoncé as a control freak, and perhaps she is, but control isn’t such a bad thing. Lately, I’ve been thinking about her bifurcated self in the context of somewhat-forgotten cyberfeminist theory. In the 1980s, academics believed that technology would introduce profound changes for humankind, especially women. Donna Haraway, emerita professor of the history of consciousness and feminist studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and an inspiration for cyberfeminism, wrote that new technologies could liberate women from patriarchy and other oppressive systems. In the distant future, she believed, people could assume virtual bodies, allowing for “permanently partial identities” that could exist beyond gender, beyond reproach and without limits.

The internet preserved many of the same biases and hierarchies Haraway so desperately hoped we could escape. And there are no true cyborgs yet. But social media has, in its own way, provided us a means of generating other selves. We just haven’t yet learned to set them free. Beyoncé has, in her own way. The Beyoncé we follow seems to live and breathe, and provokes a real emotional reaction. It’s an illusion that feels intimate and real, a hologram self for us to interact with that, in theory, provides the actual Beyoncé space to exist away from our prying eyes.

This isn’t a strategy that works for only the incredibly rich and famous. I believe it’s a useful way of thinking about how we could all behave online. Why fret about oversharing, or undersharing, or to what extent our online selves are true to our ac­tual self? We could instead use social media as a prism through which we can project only what we want others to see. We can save the rest for ourselves — our actual selves.

Taylor Swift Maximizes Use of Social Media in Release of New Album

BEN SISARIO NYTimes.com 08/19/14

For most pop stars, the announcement of a new album is a pretty routine affair. But most pop stars are not Taylor Swift.

Demonstrating her mastery of online media, and of the aggressive yet folksy style of self-promotion that has made her one of the most successful acts of her generation, Ms. Swift on Monday released a new music video and announced that her next album, “1989,” would come out Oct. 27.

The announcement took the form of a talk-show presentation with cheering fans that was streamed live by Yahoo, with the simultaneous premiere of the video for her new song, “Shake It Off,” on the online music service Vevo. During the brief announcement, Ms. Swift, who started out firmly in the country world but has gradually moved closer to pop, chatted breezily about the inspirations for her new music and called “1989” her “very first documented, official pop album.” She also answered questions from fans that came through Instagram, Skype and Twitter.

Ms. Swift, 24, also directed fans to her website, where they could preorder different versions of the album, named for the year of her birth.

With the announcement, Ms. Swift seemed to be taking the next step in a constantly evolving game of album promotion by pop stars. For her last release, “Red,” in 2012, she relied heavily on partnerships with consumer brands like Target, Walgreens and Papa John’s pizza, a strategy that helped the album sell 1.2 million copies in the first week of its release.

But since then, other big albums have been accompanied by ever more inventive release plans. Jay Z put out an album through a smartphone app, and Beyoncé’s came out on iTunes with no advance warning — a strategy so novel that it became a news story on its own. Last month, Weird Al Yankovic helped make “Mandatory Fun” the first No. 1 album of his three-decade career by releasing a video a day for eight days straight, complete with a Twitter hashtag that increased the videos’ viral appeal.

Ms. Swift stoked interest in the days leading up to her announcement by appearing on “The Tonight Show” with Jimmy Fallon and posting teases to her Instagram account, which has 10.4 million followers. (Her Twitter account ranks fifth in terms of followers, with 42.7 million.)

Yahoo did not immediately respond to a question Monday evening about how many times the video had been watched. But within minutes of Ms. Swift’s announcement, Twitter had ranked her as a top discussion trend.

The Big Business of Fake Fans

Gaming social media is common in the music industry — but success isn’t as easy as buying a million YouTube views

By Amy Silverstein  LA Weekly  10/03/13

 

In September 2012, a would-be pop star who goes by BAKER — one word, all caps — was scheduled to play the House of Blues on the Sunset Strip from 8 to 9 p.m. Tickets were available for $10 at eventbrite.com, a do-it-yourself event-ticketing site.

Yet three months later, BAKER was on the verge of superstardom — at least, according to the Internet. The video for the singer’s “Not Gonna Wait,” a slick dance track, had racked up millions of views on YouTube, catching the attention of the online music press.

“Earning well over 4 million YouTube hits, we are POSITIVE that if it hasn’t already, ‘Not Gonna Wait’ will find its home in da club,” MTV’s Buzzworthy Blog wrote on Dec. 3. Ten days later, BAKER was the subject of a short write-up on Billboard.com, which similarly focused on the impressive views notched by “Not Gonna Wait.” The next day, the O Music Awards blog published a glowing review of BAKER’s concert in the basement studio at Webster Hall in New York City: “BAKER looks good, sounds good, gyrates and fist-pumps along to his hits. The only thing missing is an audience.”

Despite those millions of views, only 30 people bothered to show up.

Hypebot, another music website, found the discrepancy between the singer’s online fan base and his real-life star power to be odd, suggesting the singer had committed one of the music industry’s oldest forms of fraud: paying for his fans. “The possibility that BAKER bought social media support is worth further investigation,” HypeBot’s Clyde Smith wrote.

Musicians have long manipulated their social media numbers, in hopes that the appearance of an online fan base, no matter how artificial, will translate into real fans and big sales. Buying YouTube views became big business about four years ago, reportedly after a former YouTube employee turned rogue. Now, social media manipulation is a multimillion-dollar industry.

It’s not just musicians buying in: During the presidential election last year, both Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich were accused of buying Twitter followers. It’s an updated spin on the age-old practice of buying your way to the top — you fake your popularity until, maybe, all those make-believe fans attract real ones.

So music industry insiders’ inboxes are flooded with pitches from sites promising to help juke their stats. While YouTube cracks down on so-called “black hat” services that make use of spambots such as YouLikeHits and AddMeFast, it seems to be OK with other services. Companies such as Vagex.com and Virool claim to offer customers “real YouTube views” for a small fee. On Vagex, users download a social exchange software that gives people credits for watching others’ YouTube videos, which they then “spend” to boost their own views. Virool, an online marketing company and “the most affordable source of real YouTube views,” will work on an advertising campaign with artists who deposit just $10.

Musicians say the so-called real-views sites work — but only if your goal is gaming YouTube.

Joshua Smotherman, a PR consultant who founded the Middle Tennessee Music blog and admits to using exchange sites for his band, BUNKS, says: “Our album sales didn’t increase, our downloads didn’t increase, our mailing list sign-ups didn’t increase, and that’s really what we care about.”

Indeed, inflated stats are so prevalent that music industry insiders say that millions of YouTube views don’t mean all that much anymore. In fact, having an unreasonably large social media following could backfire.

“That they work and they’re touring and they’re actually doing their part of the deal, that’s way more important to me than if they have 100,000 YouTube views,” says Erv Karwelis, president and founder of Dallas-based indie label Idol Records. “For the most part, that doesn’t translate to sales anyway.”

Karwelis spent 20 years working for major labels, back when they still had offices in Dallas. Before the Internet, he acknowledges, the majors inflated their stats the old-fashioned way — by bribing radio DJs. That practice dates back to the 1950s and remains pervasive. “Major labels will do absolutely anything to trick people into buying their music,” Karwelis says. “I mean they will do absolutely anything — there’s nothing that they won’t do, especially if it’s shady.”

That includes juking online stats.

In December, YouTube stripped Universal and Sony of a combined 2 billion views, saying it was “an enforcement of our view-count policies.” No one has nailed down what service the labels used to game their states, but the Daily Dot, a website that broke the news of the crackdown, drew a connection between YouTube’s enforcement action and an online marketer known only as Tapangoldy. (During the crackdown, Tapangoldy went offline “to fix all issue thanks.”)

The availability of cheap YouTube views means that even D.I.Y. artists can participate in payola.

Michelle McDevitt, president of Audible Treats, a small entertainment PR company, has been approached by so many young artists with bogus views that she has become expert in catching phonies. If someone gets, say, 150,000 SoundCloud listens in a week, she’ll research their previous projects. If the previous one got a mere 2,000 listens, it’s a red flag: “Unless that person has done something significant between the projects or has blown up to [A$AP] Rocky status or something like that, there’s no explanation for that sudden increase in listens and views.”

It’s also a bad investment. “If you’re a new artist with nothing, you have no fans, no followers, you’re an idiot if you go and buy 10,000 views for your first music video,” PR consultant Smotherman says.

The same is true of buying a Facebook ad to attract new “likes.” Even if the band is operating with good intentions, hoping to find actual fans, casting too wide a net can be wildly problematic.

Eugene, Ore., metal band Black Hare learned that lesson earlier this year. After Facebook introduced its controversial new “promoted posts,” Black Hare bought a few. Suddenly, the band had more than 65,000 fans, up from an estimated 4,000.

The problem is that the fans seemed to come out of nowhere — or, more precisely, Egypt. “We were trying to push out show details,” Black Hare’s Tracy Daken says, but the band’s Egyptian fan base had no interest in seeing shows in Oregon. Show info is buried by what Daken estimates are at least 45,000 fake fans. Facebook won’t allow the band to delete individual likes, putting Black Hare in a trap: Thanks to the site’s complicated algorithms, which allow only a percentage of fans to see any given post on their newsfeed, fewer legitimate Black Hare supporters will see the band’s posts unless the band keep paying Facebook to promote them.

Black Hare have refused to do so. “We are probably going to get a new page by the end of the year to solve it,” Daken says.

Red Seas Fire, a British prog-rock band, had similar problems after purchasing a promoted post, guitarist Peter Graves says.

“We ended up having to block the countries where the ‘likes’ seemed to be coming from, and once we did that for one country, they started appearing from other countries,” he says in an email. Eventually the fake “likes” stopped flowing in — after his band blocked 112 countries.

As of press time, BAKER still hasn’t lost any views on his “Not Gonna Wait” video. It has close to 7 million viewers — much more than the singer’s next most popular video, which has 1.1 million. (Other videos on his channel range from 70,000 to 700,000.) He has an EP available on iTunes now but can’t say how the sales are. “I haven’t checked actually. I really don’t know,” he says.

His YouTube numbers vary, he says, because he hired ClearMetrics, an advertising company, to promote the “Not Gonna Wait” video. He didn’t bother with the others after seeing that online views didn’t translate into real-world sales. For the kind of music he makes — traditional pop — “the big labels and big radio money are still what counts,” he says. “And that was never something that we had, so we tried to do the best we could with the resources available to us.”

Now based in L.A. and still making music, BAKER maintains that his online fan base is legitimate. He responded to Hypebot’s allegation last year in a statement: “My management did what we could to get the word out, including sending emails, broadening search terms, and a Google AdWords campaign for the first six weeks. … It just so happened that the spike (and my now growing fan base) are on the other side of the world.”