What is your most frequently visited destination when it comes to music searches? There’s a good chance it’s Wikipedia. Heather Dougherty of Hitwise put together some interesting data involving the top music destinations online. Based on her research, the largest percentage of traffic (at 24%) went there.
Her research was done by monitoring top websites receiving traffic from a portfolio of 1,300 band and artist names over several months. Obviously the fact that Wikipedia entries frequently turn up at the top of Google results plays a significant role in this.
Dougherty emphasizes the point however, that YouTube comes in second above MySpace, which has a pretty solid reputation for attracting the music-interested crowd. You can see the comparison here.
This information is slightly more interesting, because while Google does in fact own YouTube, MySpace pages for artists frequently (while not always, granted) appear above YouTube results in Google searches.
Don’t count out official artist pages either, because they frequently appear at the top too. Dougherty looks at an example using popular artist Taylor Swift, and MySpace is ranked fifth in traffic beneath her official site (which is ranked at the top in Google) and even Yahoo.
What does this mean for MySpace? I don’t want to jump to any conclusions based on this one piece of research, but with the competitive nature of online music, and YouTube making more moves to get high quality content, maybe MySpace should try to work out some kind of partnership with Wikipedia.
