Can your band achieve mainstream success via social media?

Recently we highlighted the story of Jon Gomm’s viral video hit Passionflower and the how it received over a million views thanks to Reddit and social media. Many people see viral hits as useful but can’t see that they cross over into the mainstream press and TV. It depends who is talking about your music and how influential they are. This is how Jon Gomm went from posting a video on Youtube to playing live on BBC news after the video had already gone viral online:

• First Stephen Fry tweeted about the video –  His tweet simply read “WOW” with a link to the video. Although we don’t know how he found the video this caused many thousands more hits to the video, which was already on well over a million hits. This then gets shared and this causes it to achieve more viral success. This is after the events in our original blog post.

• The press picked up on the story – Once Mr Fry’s celebrity name became attached the story becomes “Stephen Fry tweets about Jon Gomm and it goes viral” (even thou it was already over a million views before Stephen Fry was involved!). The national press started to get interested. “A one-word tweet from author Stephen Fry has boosted the career of an aspiring singer – after it increased traffic to his latest video by one million hits.” was a typical quote from The Telegraph.

• TV companies get involved – Once the story becomes about Stephen Fry discovering an obscure musician it is of interest to the television. Jon appears on BBC Breakfast TV and his video is featured on prime time TV’s The One Show as part of an interview with Stephen Fry. Here is a video of Jon on BBC Breakfast:

• David Crosby gets in touch – All this brings Jon’s music to the attention of the legendary David Crosby of Crosby, Still and Nash fame. Another celebrity name attached to the story does it no harm at all and the buzz continues.

Through all this interest Jon has continued to stay 100% independent and refused all record company offers. Many people in the media seemed shocked he wasn’t interested in working with a record company. His music is selling well and his gigs are selling out. It is all without any PR company, direct to fan. It shows that if you have a story (especially one with a celebrity involved like Stephen Fry) you can get the mainstream media involved.

It is great to see Jon Gomm reaching a larger audience but all this came about because Jon’s music is genuinely great and he worked for years on the live circuit and online gradually building an audience. On this occasion he got a lucky break but the more hard work you put in playing live and making friends the more chance you have of eventually connecting with someone of influence such as Stephen Fry. It’s important to remember that the video had already gone viral before any of this happened