Los Angeles was host to this year’s Music Biz conference that spanned from May 6th to the 8th. With a slew of panels and speakers, much of the music industry attends the event to learn, talk and network, and this year was no different. One panel that caught our attention was “Harnessing the Power of Social Media Trends in 2014″ where speaker Kevin Carr, Client Partner at Facebook, got into a bit of an altercation with an attending artist. The topic, as I’m sure you’ve guessed by now, was that of Facebook’s recent and continuous trend of essentially forcing Facebook pages to shell out large sums of money in order to reach their full audience. In case you don’t know, Facebook, to better monetize growing pages, has been slowly reducing the number of people who can see the posts made by a page. For example, the Your EDM Facebook page is currently sitting at around 80,000 likes, but whenever a post is shared, only about 10,000-20,000 of our “likers” see it, unless we’re willing to spend close to $1,000 per post to have it “sponsored” so that it reaches all 80,000 followers. Considering we post around 12-16 times a day, the approximate total cost would be $16,000 a day if we wanted everyone who’s liked the page over the past 2 years to see the content. We simply cannot afford that, nor can small artists. That’s where the following conversation comes in. Let us know your thoughts in the comment section below!
The transcribed conversation is courtesy of: Digital Music News 
Tony Groticelli, UMG Nashville (Moderator): Do you have a question over here?
Artist in the audience: Yeah, my question is for Kevin [Carr]. It’s that, I understand that it’s becoming more competitive, but you have bands, artists, labels who have spent tons of money, countless hours… years building their Facebook fan bases. And now, you’re charging them to reach the audience that they paid and spent hours and hours and countless resources to build.
So are you going to do anything for those artists who are now not able to reach those fans that they spent so much time and money building? Do you have a program for artists and labels to help promote them as a make good, for making them pay to reach their fans?
Kevin Carr, Facebook: Sure. I really think it comes down to – because there are artists and there are actors and there are brands that are reaching a ton of their fans though. So not everyone has had that happen –
Artist: — right, the big ones –
Carr: — I think –
Artist: — but, if you have 30 million fans, you have to spend tens of thousands of dollars to reach those fans.
Carr: It’s, it’s not a matter of — we’re not trying to punish anyone. And its’ not like we’re trying to turn on a money machine. It really comes down to authentic content, reaching the person.
Artist: Right, but how much more authentic can it be? George Tekei speaks out about this, right. He spent all this time and money building a huge fan base, he wants to advertise, ‘hey, I’m appearing at this bookstore to sign books.’ He has to pay to reach those fans, but how much more authentic could it be? ’Hey guys, you’re my fans, I want you to come see me.’
But I have to pay for that now? What are you going to do for that? Is there any plan to help?
Carr: No, I mean, we — we don’t have a plan like you are articulating. To sort of –
Artist: What’s more authentic than that? Hey, my fans, come see me here –
Gino Sesto (Dash Two): I have to come to his defense a little bit. You have to realize that… not all of those fans were paid for, it was a free platform probably for most of the fans that he acquired.
Artist: No no, but he spent time and money developing that fan base –
Sesto: — right, but he was able to speak to his audience at the time. The problem is that the platform has become mature, and they’re not trying to be like Twitter and just have it to be an open firehose. So they’re trying to curate the content a little bit for the people. I don’t know exactly how the algorithm works, but I have to assume that if someone is interacting with the artist a bunch of times, they’re probably going to see posts.
Artist: Yeah but to get to 30 million fans, that takes a lot of time and money. and then to have to pay tens of thousands of dollars to reach those fans. That’s kind of tough.
So there’s nothing, there’s no artist program, there’s nothing that Facebook is going to do to work with those artists?
Carr: I totally empathize, I totally understand and I’ve talked to other folks that have had the same experience. I don’t have a program that is going to give out organic reach. It really comes down to what I was saying before, is that the authentic voice reaching the person that wants to see that.
It’s become much more crowded, it’s become very competitive. And, news feeds for one person – you could have one person that’s eligible to see 1,500 posts in a day. But we’re trying to show the ones that out of all those artists, all the years that they’ve acquired all those Likes and those Pages, we want to show the ones that are relevant so they stay engaged on Facebook.
Groticelli: Let’s go to another question –
Source: Digital Music News
Image Source: Bubblenews
