The Rise Of Emojis And How They Can Help Promote Your Music
In a mood for some smiley tunes? Since their introduction in 1999, emojis have attained massive popularity and are now littered across all social media platforms. So why not start including searchable emojis in playlist names?
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Guest Post by Philippe Giard of The Orchard on The Daily Rind
Unless you’ve lived in a cave for the past few years, you should know what an emoji is. Smileys, those mini faces that smile, laugh, cry are emojis but emojis can also be small drawings of nature, food, activities, flags 
. Initially created in Japan in 1999 by a engineer from NTT DoCoMo’s i-mode mobile Internet, emojis really started to spread outside of Japan with their inclusion in Apple’s iOS in 2011. Google added native emoji support to its keyboard in November 2013 for devices running Android 4.4. Fun fact: Apple’s color emoji typeface is proprietary as is Android’s, but so are Twitter’s and Microsoft’s which means these are not exactly the same depending on your device.
In a few years, emojis have definitely changed the way we interact with people by text, chat and socials to become a crucial part of culture and communication. Prime example: if you’re not sure your recipient will understand your stupid joke, add a smiley! You only have 140 characters on Twitter, so using an emoji instead of an adjective can save your perfectly structured sentence. These fun small ideograms have quickly become the perfect way to communicate emotions and feelings in ways that anyone can understand, regardless of language or background. For these reasons, platforms like Instagram have recently introduced emoji hashtags for easier searching. A perfect way to find sad or melancholic shots, tag photos using #
or happier ones using #
.
Coming back a little bit more to music now, I’m sure I’m not the only one to have noticed that with the rise of streaming and playlists, moods are becoming the new genre and people are now looking for music to chill to, workout to, go to bed to… So why don’t platforms start thinking about allowing emojis on playlist names and search? That would be an easy, universal and funny way to discover new music and get a clear understanding of what people are listening to.
Indeed these small universal icons have quickly provided a new way to analyze a country or get a glimpse of someone’s mood. In this study for instance, we discover that the French love hearts 
(ever romantic, these Frenchies) and Americans love skulls 
(I won’t try to find an explanation 
). You can knock yourself out analyzing people’s current mood using this real-time Emoji tracker on Twitter.
The universal language of emojis has now been adopted by brands, too. McDonalds started creating their own emojis using proprietary apps (so you can send virtual Big Macs or Chicken Nuggets to your friends) and to promote their highly anticipated new film at the end of the year, Disney recently created Star Wars emojis. With that… may the Emoji be with you!
