Do Insta Albums Equal Insta Money?
The journey to reaching fans, creating hype and making money off your music has many roads. It might sound counterintuitive, but you can in fact make money by giving away something for free. A real-world example: Costco’s reliance on giveaways to drive revenue, profiled in a 2014 Atlantic article—pizza sales increased 600 percent following in-store freebies. Music snippets delivered right to your digital doorstep, kindly dropped into timelines, adheres to the same psychology, just as free mixtape downloads helped launch dozens of rap careers not long ago.
Instagram’s founders might have never envisioned their photo-sharing app becoming one of music’s most crucial cornerstones, but evolution isn’t a wholly predictable science. Perhaps no artist alive deserves more recognition for embracing the platform for music distribution than Tierra Whack, an impossibly talented hip-hop artist who uploaded every second of the 15 one-minute tracks comprising her debut album, Whack World, to her IG feed. Is she getting paid? Not directly. Does it matter? Yes and no.
Read the AWAL article, Insta-Albums: It Pays To Be Social (Sort Of) here.
