The top two Twitter trending entertainment topics in the first half of 2011 were singer Rebecca Black and Femme Fatale, the recent album from Britney Spears, while UK band Mumford & Sons were the eighth most popular topic.
And four of the top five Twitter users based on number of followers are musicians, with Lady GaGa and Justin Bieber at one and two, ahead of Barack Obama.
Meanwhile, Eminem's official Facebook page has the third largest number of "likes", according to the Guinness Book of Records with 42.05m, behind Facebook's own page and Zynga's Texas Hold'em. GaGa's Facebook has 39.49m "likes" in fifth.
Music Week today looks at the increasing influence that social media possesses - notably Facebook, Twitter and YouTube - in promoting artists.
"Social media is really important because one of the best forms of marketing is word of mouth," said Gareth Currie, director of social media specialist United Agency, which has recently worked on campaigns for Kaiser Chiefs and Deadmau5. "So instead of it being top down, it is breaking down the barriers between fans and artists."
New figures from Nielsen show that Twitter's UK audience increased by a third in May, with Facebook now the second most-popular website in the country, behind Google.
Myspace, the first social media site to really gain traction, was also in the news last week as Justin Timberlake joined with Californian digital advertising agency Specific Media to buy the company for just $35m (?22m).
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