More friends than fans
From a post by ireadfaux at Reddit.com:
So a couple of days ago Bieber’s album ‘Believe’ went platinum. Twitter blew up about it and millions of his followers were congratulating him – as they do….
But here is an interesting thought….
A platinum album is 1 millions sales….
Bieber has 25 million twitter followers….
So only 4% of his supposed fan base have bought the album.
If you look at his facebook fans, he has 45 millions, so thats only 2.2% of those that have actually bought it.
But why would he care….he is a youtube partner and has had over 2.7 billion views of his videos….paid at an average of $1.25 per 1000 views for youtube partners…. thats 3.3 mill from just youtube views.
Just thoughts.
Pre-Net, a lot more people would have said they liked an artist than would have bought the latest album. You would listen on the radio or watch when they came on TV. So it’s hard to know if much has changed, if only because as far as I know we don’t know how many people liked, say, Elton John, versus how many copies of his LPs sold.
Nevertheless, the current statistics are puzzling. Are fans getting their fill of The Biebs on YouTube? On Spotify et al.? I somehow doubt that 24M fans torrented the album. Is “Liking” Beieber more of a tribal identification thing? Compared to pre-Net, is the fan-performer relationship basically the same, radically different, or somewhere in between?
I dunno how to explain these Bieber stats. And I don’t know how to know.
