Longing for the day ...

The Most Popular Music Websites In 2010 - hypebot

This map is a really freaky depiction of the relative amounts of US traffic for each of the major websites where music is streamed or downloaded (websites with less than 100,000 monthly visits are omitted):

The article around it explains that Green means the growth for December 2010 was an increase on traffic in December 2009 - the darker the green, the greater the growth. It notes that this is traffic only from US sources, which means that non-US websites like Spotify are under-represented. It also raises more questions than it answers in terms of what's really going on with music websites.

But the real kicker is in the full chart:

A couple of quirks in the data: apparently this data reveals that the average Vevo user watches 23 Lady Gaga videos per month. That figure alone gives me reason to doubt the accuracy of this report. Also, the exclusion of non-US data makes this pretty meaningless in global terms ... but it is certainly indicative of a pattern in current music consumption.

And, of course, the size of the overall traffic does not reflect the amount of traffic any particular video might receive. There is almost certainly a Long Tail of music within this large number. Putting your music videos in here will NOT guarantee that anyone will watch them - you still have to promote, market, engage and so on.

This clearly shows that, despite the demise of MTV, Michael Jackson's legacy lives on: music is a visual artform. Or, at least, commercial music is ...

The takeout for Indies:

If you want people to engage with your music you can't afford to limit the way it is presented to them. Your art is more than your music and it needs to be recorded, played live, combined with video, synced with TV and/or movies, portrayed in static visuals on merch ... generally re-purposed and re-expressed in as many ways as people can comprehend. At the very least, you are missing a huge potential audience if you're not making videos.