Lil Uzi Vert and his Social Media Use as a means of Communication: Blog
[About the Blog]
This case study will explore the ways in which music artists use social networking sites and their tools to promote themselves and their projects to their fans and potential listeners.
The individual of the case study I have chosen is 2x Grammy nominated and multi platinum selling Hip-Hop artist/rapper - Lil Uzi Vert, known as Symere Woods.
Located in the United States, originally from Philadelphia; the reason for the success of Lil Uzi Vert's career is largely because of the internet and his presence online social networking sites.
We will examine the ways in which him and his team had used social networking sites such as Twitter and Instagram, Facebook and YouTube to his advantage in order to promote his highly anticipated album titled ‘Eternal Atake’ by communicating with his audience throughout various social networking sites.
Lil Uzi Vert is one of the most recognisable artists in the music industry, specifically in the Hip-Hop/Rap community. Fans of Lil Uzi and the genre have been anticipating nearly 3 years for the album, 'Eternal Atake', after he announced it in 2018. Which is where the timeline of the campaign originally begins.
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Fig.1 Number of Posts related to the
Futsal Shuffle on Instagram.
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Fig.2 The hashtag #fustalshuffle2020
has almost 9m views on Tik-Tok.
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It is clear that the challenge was a marketing technique in order to maximise his reach online and across social media by giving his audience something that they can participate in and be a part of through the challenge.
Months later into early 2020, Lil Uzi becomes increasingly active on social media, especially via Twitter, but does not release anything until the beginning of March, another single from the album.
But this time he spread his name through the media with a surprise collaboration with The Backstreet Boys - sampling their hit single “I Want It That Way”, Lil Uzi Vert released his track “That Way” on March 1st 2020. Peaking at number 20 on the Billboard Hot 100 charts, a lot of fans positively responded on Twitter regards to the collaboration, with Nick Carter of The Backstreet Boys even showing support for Lil Uzi Vert on Twitter by tweeting Lil Uzi Vert's iconic track, ‘XO Tour Llif3’.
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| Fig.3 Screen shot of Nick Carter of The Backstreet Boys tweeting Lil Uzi Vert's music after their collaboration |
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| Fig.4 Screenshot of Nick Carter of the Back Street Boys tweeting about a collaboration with Lil Uzi Vert. |
Furthermore, he also hinted on further collaboration with Lil Uzi Vert on their next album by directly re-tweeting an article posted by Complex (A well known and respected Hip-Hop news outlet), and also directly inclining that now he’s “gonna have to featured on their next album” on a direct tweet reply to another popular Hiphop news outlet, XXL Magazine.
Currently as of March 25th, “That Way” by Lil Uzi Vert is his second most popular song from the album at the moment on his Spotify profile with his track achieving over 50M streams on the platform.
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| Fig.5 Screenshot of popular fan page posting about the albums streams on Instagram |
5 days later Lil Uzi Vert and his team decided to surprise fans and the Hip-Hop community by releasing the album a week earlier than expected, 'Eternal Atake' released on the 6th of March 2020, posting the news to his audiences across various social networking sites such as Twitter and Instagram.
Fans were eager to hear new music from this artist as they speculated and spread rumours and theories about the album's release. Once it had released this buzz that Lil Uzi Vert had created had made his album a success, despite there being mixed feelings about how the album was perceived from the various comments on Instagram and YouTube or replies on Twitter.
Lil Uzi Vert had managed to get his album to debut at number one on the Apple Music and Spotify charts as well as some official charts across the globe, obtaining just under 50M streams on Spotify alone on its debut day, and achieving more than 550M streams in its first week world wide.
Twitter Observation
After observing Lil Uzi Vert's social media use, Twitter was clearly the main social networking site that was used in order to communicate to his audience about his highly anticipated album. His Twitter account went from a following of 6M at the start of the campaign to 6.5M by the time of the project's release.
Lil Uzi Vert is known for being highly active on Twitter and engaging with his audience by replying to tweets and re-tweeting their posts and also interacting with other big artists on the platform.
Interestingly he appears to have been highly active on the week beginning 2nd of March compared to previous weeks, up until the albums release.
On the 2nd of March he managed to get his name trending at number 6 on Twitter in the US, but as Baby Pluto. He confirmed the meaning behind the name Baby Pluto in a re-tweet from a fan who explains the name’s definition in a tweet.
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| Fig.6 Screenshot of Lil Uzi Vert Trending as 'Baby Pluto' on 02/03/2020 |
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| Fig.7 Screenshot of Lil Uzi Vert tweeting a reply to XXL Magazine's post. |
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| Fig.8 Screenshot of Lil Uzi Tweeting about his album cover and replying to a fan about his best song. |
Lil Uzi Vert also communicates the meaning behind his new alternate persona through a series of tweets from his account and retweets from his fans reply’s to those tweets, whilst also giving out new information on the albums progress by posting three album covers simultaneously.
The artist then started a Twitter poll to let his audience/ listeners decide which cover out of the three should be the official album cover.
This had resulted in a divided dispute within his fan base in which album cover should have been chosen, with many showing their perforation for cover two but his audience on other platforms such as Instagram had shown that they prefer the third cover.
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| Fig.10 Screenshot of second poll for album covers created by Lil Uzi Vert |
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| Fig.9 Screenshot of first poll for album covers created by Lil Uzi Vert |
These polls had brought a lot of engagement to the artists page, as it allowed his audience to interact with him and decide how they want their album. With the first poll having a total over 460K voters and the second poll acquiring votes from 320K accounts.
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| Fig.11 Monthly gained followers during 12/2019 was at 220K |
Lil Uzi Vert's monthly gained Twitter followers increased due to the engagement brought to his profile. At the start of the campaign when he was just starting to become more active again, compared to previous months as seen on the graph, he was only gaining an average of 220K followers in December and January, and even declined lower around February as shown from the graph on the right.
These stats and graphs are provided by Social Blade, a website that allows you to look into in-depth statistics about social media profiles online. Used by industry professionals to get an idea of a brands social profile and influence or an individual.
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| Fig12. Monthly gained followers during 03/2020 was at 500K |
The graph on the left, on the other hand, shows a significant increase
in the amount of Twitter followers gained in a month, where Lil Uzi Vert gained 300K above average. Resulting in him growing over 500K followers in March, and now sits at 6.5M total followers as a result of the campaign.
Instagram Observation
Instagram was probably the second most used platform for the promotion campaign for Eternal Atake. The promotion for the album, on Instagram, began on the 4th of January 2020 in which Lil Uzi posted two photos of portraits of women standing in a purple dress against a purple cloudy sky background.
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| Fig.13 Screenshot of Lil Uzi's Instagram profile showing his posts throughout the campaign |
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| Fig 14. Screenshot of Lil Uzi Vert's first Instagram post during the campaign for the album |
He continued to post similar images of different women, one the following day, and the fourth on the 25th of January 2020. He did not give an explanation behind the meaning of these photos and the women; until he tweeted about the theme behind his album after its release, but fans had already generally seem to understand that it was linked to the album.
After that the following posts come after Twitter, so Lil Uzi Vert appears to have used Twitter primarily for his promotion as he gave out information from their first and then followed onto Instagram.
The album trailer that was posted on Twitter and YouTube obtained just over 4M views on Instagram with 38,000 comments, the post showcasing the track-list has gotten over 1M likes with 20,000 comments.
And on the day of the albums release he posted a picture featuring the album cover, captioning it “Eternal Atake The Album Out Now!🛸👽🤲🏾🌟”, and obtaining the most likes on his page as of right now with over 3M likes and 130,000 comments.
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| Fig.15 Screenshot of Lil Uzi Vert's post on the day of the albums release, with 3M likes, 100K comments. |
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| Fig.16 Screenshot of Lil Uzi Vert's post of the albumstrailer with 4M views, 38K comments. |
Fans and popular news pages had shown huge support of the album on the day of release, and also in the build up to it, by posting on their Instagram stories and pages about their excitement over the project. Over the period of March, Lil Uzi Vert gained over 1.5M new followers on Instagram, going from 10.5M followers at the end of February to 12M by the end of March.
YouTube Observation
YouTube was probably the third most used/ engaged platform Lil Uzi Vert has used to promote and communicate to his fans about his most recent album. Lil Uzi Vert has a large audience on YouTube with 6.7M subscribers.
After not posting anything to the channel 6 months prior, Lil Uzi Vert started the campaign on YouTube when he uploaded the official audio for his track “Futsal Shuffle 2020” to his channel during mid December.
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| Fig.17 Screenshot showing views and likes of the official audio for "Futsal Shuffle 2020" |
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| Fig.18 Screenshot showing views and likes of the official music video for "Futsal Shuffle 2020" |
This was followed by a music video, which was released in response to the challenge going viral all over various social networking sites. The music video and audio both received similar outcomes with both having around 25M views over 550K likes each and 40K comments.
The albums trailer was also uploaded to YouTube, acquiring over 3.5M views.
Apart from that Lil Uzi Vert did not upload any other content to promote his album.
The audio tracks he uploaded off the album after its release resulted in his YouTube channel getting over 130M views in the month of March, compared to averaging around 35M views over the three previous months.
This is shown on the graphs on the left, the first showing his channel views at the start of the campaign and his views by the end of it.
Fig.19 YouTube starts at start and end of campaign from Social Blade.
EVALUATION REPORT
The case study that I had examined was Lil Uzi Vert and how he had used social networking sites to communicate the release of his new album to his audience and fans of the Hip-Hop community. Prior to the release of his new album 'Eternal Atake', Lil Uzi Vert had not released a new project since the summer of 2017. 'Eternal Atake' was announced later in 2018 but his fans still saw no sign of it until March of this year. The artist managed to trend throughout a 3 month long campaign with the use of various social networking sites.
It comes to no surprise that Lil Uzi Vert had used social media in order to promote his new music as he is known for having a very active online presence. His fans have grown used to communicating with the artist through these social networking sites as the artist appears as more of a familiar friend. This is true as the constant communication between fans and artists is expected in this generation of musicians, 'a reconfiguration of of the relations between performers and audiences [since] the "rock god" or "popstar" becomes an ordinary member of the network as that enigmatic distance is breached and they become a familiar friend"' (Beer, 2008:233)
Therefore this statement applies to Lil Uzi Vert's campaign in using social media in order to promote his album as he is an active member of the network by engaging with his audience through replying to comments/ tweets.
The reason why Twitter is the artist's main platform for communicating to his fans is because the platform is known to disrupt the 'expectation of parasociality between the famous person and the fan.' (Marwick and Boyd, 2011:157).
Lil Uzi Vert has a large online following, using several platforms. The artist uses the different platforms for specific purposes in promoting himself and his music. Using Twitter to directly respond to fans, and YouTube to show music video content, and Instagram to promote album visual content and himself. He has over 6M subscribers on YouTube and followers on Twitter, 12M followers on Instagram and 1M likes on Facebook.
The reason behind the success of the track that started the campaign, "Futsal Shuffle 2020", was because Lil Uzi Vert already had a major online presence with millions of followers across social media platforms. It is said that 'due to the digitisation of music, emergence of social media technologies, and popularity of social media, marketers can now reach potential music consumers via social networks.' (Salo et al 2013:24). This applies to the artist as his challenge went viral all over various social networking sites, including Tik Tok which interestingly the artist does not have a presence on the platform - yet posts tagged with the challenge name have just under 10M views on the platform.
Furthermore, Lil Uzi Vert's Twitter activity on how he communicates with this audience further supports the point that "Twitter creates a new expectation of intimacy."(Maverick and Boyd, 2011:157) and this level of engagement with his audience is seen from when he posted the polls onto his Twitter profile, allowing fans to decide the album cover for the project.
The use of social media has allowed labels and artists to gain wider perspectives on their fan bases, which allows them to adopt appropriate marketing strategies. The streaming numbers achieved on the first week by Lil Uzi Vert come from various online streaming platforms but Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube appear to be the most popular as the majority of his audience are on those platforms. And these numbers are achieved by the clever algorithms that are on the platforms. Spotify for example has thousands of playlists that they use to let their users find new music, as well as algorithmically curated playlists that show users new music based on their listening history and what their friends are listening to.
This can be advantageous for an artist, in this case Lil Uzi Vert and his marketing/promotion team, as they can see a lot of valuable data about the type of audience that’s listening to his music and those who would potentially become fans as they have insights to data such as age group, gender, location.
The major playlists on Spotify, 'playlists like Today’s Top Hits, RapCaviar, Baila Reggaeton, and Viva Latino are all global
lists that are curated by Spotify employees, who choose songs for inclusion on the lists.' (Aguiar & Waldfogel, 2018:4) These playlists have the most followers on the platform and usually only 'include songs and artists that are already widely known' as they are owned/ influenced by the major record companies.
Overall Lil Uzi Vert had used social media to his advantage in order to communicate the release of his album to his fans. He continued to communicate with fans by highly engaging with them via Twitter.
Other forms of communication on social media were used with the use of the dance challenge to maximise his reach and spread awareness of his albums release as he managed to trend on platforms where he does not have a presence on - such as Tik Tok.
However, I feel Lil Uzi Vert could have communicated better with his audience through Instagram as it is the platform where he has the most followers at 12M. By creating more content or even posting about the album's progress onto Instagram, like he did on Twitter, to reach as many people as possible.
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