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2010 Music Website Heat Map

Ryan Van Etten — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 06:42:02 +0000

If you’re red-green color blind then this is going to hurt. Based on estimated traffic data from Compete, this visualization depicts web-based music consumption in the U.S. in 2010. Included are websites where music is streamed and/or downloaded. Due to accurate sample rate availability (and in the interest of sanity) websites with less than 100,000 monthly visits are omitted. The map is to scale. Larger map areas represent higher website traffic. Green indicates positive growth in 2010. Red indicates negative growth in 2010. Hold your mouse over each area for stats—the visits/month stats are for December 2010. For those that don’t speak metric: 1k = 1,000. 1M = 1,000,000.

There’s a lot of green—as a whole music consumption on the web is clearly increasing. One contributing factor to that is that the percentage of people that have internet access is growing. Notably extreme growth occurred for SoundCloud, OurStage, Bandcamp, Grooveshark, and ReverbNation. It’s understandable why SoundCloud is rocketing—it offers rock-solid tools, widgets, community, and an API. In summer 2010, SoundCloud launched a Creative Commons search page. Like Indaba Music, SoundCloud is heavily geared towards electronic music and producers. IMO electronic music is growing faster than rock and has more room to evolve. In my analysis of the 2009 heat map, I referred to Grooveshark as Jaws-like and this year was another feeding frenzy. Grooveshark now gets more visits than Last.fm. But let’s zoom out and view the bigger picture:

In February 2010, Sysomos reported that approximately 31% of YouTube videos are music—roughly one out of every three. The YouTube Music area on the map below represents this 31%. Its size is roughly equivalent to 3x everything else combined. Compared to YouTube, Grooveshark is a minnow. You want pop perspective? According to the Compete data, ladygaga.com had more visits in 2010 than any other artist, and although her traffic decreased 55% over the year, she still gets 5x as much traffic as nin.com. According to data from Next Big Sound, Lady Gaga videos got played 45 million times on Vevo* in December 2010. Dividing that number by the 2 million unique visitors that Compete estimated for Vevo that month tells us that the average Vevo user watches 23 Lady Gaga videos per month. Scream now if you have to. Who had the most visited website at the end of the year? I thought is was going to be paramore.net, who with over 400,000 website visits in December 2010 had Eminem, Bieber, and Gaga all beat. But it was taylorswift.com who had the most, with close to 600,000—that’s like half of Bandcamp right there.

// spreadsheet // cruncher: ryanve

It was unrealistic to accurately quantify MySpace Music this year* but if you remember from last year MySpace Music was in the same ballpark as Pandora. MySpace’s Imeem acquisition came to life, but, still, I can’t imagine they saw positive growth in 2010 since visits to MySpace proper declined 77% in 2010 according to Compete. Then there’s iTunes which is essentially not web-based and therefore unquantifiable on Compete. The itunes.apple.com subdomain used mainly for iTunes links including everything on iTunes—not just music—saw 60% growth in 2010. If it were on the map it would be 40% as big as Pandora.

Comparing relative differences as a whole paints a pretty solid picture of music consumption on the web—but it’s not a total reflection. Compete tracks web traffic from sources in the U.S. and therefore European-based services are not as accurately estimated. The same goes for certain mobile or non-web usage. Case in point: Spotify is included on the map but maybe it shouldn’t be—it’s a downloadable app like iTunes and Americans can’t use it. Google currently assigns Spotify a PageRank of 7. It assigns SoundCloud a PageRank of 6. Is Spotify that widely used or does it just get tons of press? Is Playlist so huge because it offers ringtones—anyone using it? Rdio? What will the map look like next year?

Bonus tracks: Right now The Pirate Bay gets as much traffic as MTV.com. Based on its current trajectory Pandora will soon surpass The New York Times. The most popular music magazine online is Rolling Stone—2.2M visits in December 2010. The most popular music blog is Pitchfork—1.4M visits in December 2010—like two Hype Machines. NPR is in the same ballpark as Last.fm.

Update 3/20: Based on requests to add additional sites to the heat map, there is now an alternate edition on page two that includes 8tracks and We Are Hunted rather than Thumbplay and Deezer. All are now on the data table. Regarding Lady Gaga’s 45 million plays, Colin—presumably Colin Willis from Next Big Sound—commented that Next Big Sound’s Vevo play count included Vevo plays from YouTube and therefore the 23 Lady Gaga videos per month calculation is inaccurate.

Emotional Attachment To Music

Ryan Van Etten — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 23:26:46 +0000

Terry McBride—CEO of Nettwerk—talks here about imagination. He argues that with music, context trumps content because music creates emotional bookmarks in our mind. Simply, the song is an emotion. These emotional bookmarks are significant because they enable us to travel backwards in our memories to when we experienced the music. Consumers are in control of the music industry, and access rules:

Excerpts From Terry McBride’s TEDxVancouver Talk

04:25: We hear a lot of discussion about “content is king.” Well we have to have content, granted, but content comes from your imaginations. But it’s the context that is now king. I mean think of what’s happened withinside the music business where over the last ten years, through litigation, through legislation, the business has tried to change the behavior of tens of millions of teenagers. When are we ever going to learn we cannot change the opinion of teenagers? We keep trying it generation after generation and you’d think that we would learn from history. You cannot litigate behavior and you cannot legislate behavior. What you can do is listen to it, and listen well, and understand behaviors. If the music business could accept the fact that a song is an emotion, then they’d understand that the monetization of that emotion is the business.

09:53: The iPod’s over. Apple knew that. They created something new—it’s called an iPhone. An iPhone is about behavior. It’s not about owning content. It’s about behavior. And then when they opened up that app store to allow everybody else to put their ideas in, that’s when it really took off. I mean eighteen months ago that business didn’t even exist, and now they’re doing 6.6 million downloads of applications a day. From zero. All they’ve done is crowdsourced the imagination of the world. So let’s crowdsource the imagination of that world to save the music business.

Human Brain Connections by ethanhein on flickr

Who Pays For Music Downloads, Seriously?

Ryan Van Etten — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 10:25:55 +0000

It’s 2009. Why are people are still paying for mp3 downloads when there is an abundance of awesome music available for free? Digital music is becoming more free by the minute.

Listeners: There is music that you can download for free—legally or illegally—and there is music that you can stream for free. The trend is towards streaming. I support bands that are giving their tracks away for free. I’ll even admit it—I’m offended when bands expect me to pay for an mp3 download. Am I completely off base here, or do you agree?

Unlike these records, mp3′s can be easily duplicated and shared for free. We are in a new time and we need new rules. Welcome to the digital revolution.

Bands: Giving downloads away for free is an excellent promotional move. It puts out the message that you care about your fans, and that you want them to hear your music. It is a leader into other revenue streams. I recommend collecting fans’ email addresses in exchange for free downloads. This can be achieved nicely by Bandcamp, which, in my opinion is a super-slick service. Bandcamp enables downloads in multiple hi-res formats, and the platform encourages sharing on social networks. They even offer pay-what-you-want pricing options—the only drawback is that PayPal takes a percentage. [Demo: My Bandcamp Page]

I hope paid download services shift their business models to make the music more “free” for listeners. I think services could generate ad revenue that the artists could share in—in such a way that bands could choose the ads on their pages as to match the right advertisements with the music. I recently commented about Amie Street implementing this idea, but imagine if a mega-service like iTunes could work magic like that.