Creative Uses of Social Media

Social media offers musicians a number of tools that can be used to promote our careers, build our audiences, and interact with our communities. But is there opportunity to be creative in HOW social media is used? ABSOLUTELY. Consider these three quick examples:

1. The Big Trouble, a trio of two percussionists and a vocalist decided to experiment with writing music over Instagram, sending each other videos of song ideas. Each successive video adds a layer to the song, and eventually, they have created a piece of music…over the internet…remotely! Followers get to see the musicians interact behind the scenes and get a sense of their creative process for building a song. Pretty creative, I’d say.
2. Maria Finkelmeier’s Improv-a-day: A few years ago, Maria decided to challenge herself to improvise something every day. Just 20-30 seconds of improvisation on percussion instruments or everyday objects (bag of chips, window frame, etc.) She decide to chronicle her adventures in improvisation on Instagram, recording the improvisations as videos. It was a smart move, as followers could look forward to her daily improvisation (what will she do TODAY!?) and they got to see how a creative musician could make music with virtually anything on earth.
3. Brooklyn Duo: With almost 900,000 subscribers on YouTube, this classically-trained cello and piano duo has a channel full of high-quality pop song cover videos. Beneath each video, they link to sheet music for their arrangements, so that fans can not only watch Brooklyn duo perform their favorite pop songs, but they too can perform them on cello and piano.