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.

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.

Social Rocks.

The stage is lit—music has always been social, and the web continues to make it even more so. Communication is on the rise. People want to share and “everyone who shares is an influencer.” Music discovery is powered by your friends and by recommendation engines—the technology is only getting smarter, and, in their case, everyone who listens is an influencer. Web apps like Blip.fm and Twisten.fm rely nearly entirely on friend-powered playlists and realtime recommendations. Music streamers crave sharing, simplicity, and depths of controls for customizing their listening experiences.

Shareability and community spin music in the social web. Pandora and Last.fm’s widely popular iPhone apps encourage users to share songs they like with their friends as they’re listening to them. Grooveshark’s web interface heavily encourages sharing, and its integration with Twitter via Twisten.fm and Tinysong have helped fuel its rapid growth in 2009. Nearly all of today’s free (ad-supported) streaming sites include links to purchase mp3′s via iTunes or Amazon. Vevo has them, but, YouTube—arguably the largest and most engaging music streaming site—does not.

The Delicious user base has a relatively high concentration of developers, designers, techies, nerds, etc.—individuals likely to have above-average internet savvy. As a group they are an acute filter for quality content. The chart below shows the popularity of the same music websites based on data from Delicious. You can see there is some divergence from the traffic heat map. The most notable difference is MySpace Music, which showed the highest website traffic, but shows the lowest Delicious rank. Pandora is the top-bookmarked music site on Delicious by far, with last.fm second, and Grooveshark climbing quickly. Pandora is also the top-ranked music site on Xmarks.

Musicians—many are at the center of the social mix lifecasting on Twitter, Ustream, YouTube, Facebook, and MySpace. They’re communicating like never before, and evolving the industry. Revenue comes in new forms. The urge to be “indie” is contagious. The amplifiers are on.

Mobility Rolls.

Seven of the top twelve are radio/streaming apps. But smartphones are not just for listening to music. Gigzee is an events app—a location-aware tool for finding shows/concerts in your area. With more people on smartphones, more people can take advantage of location-based services like this. Music creation apps like Virtuoso Piano, Drum Kit, freestyle, NLog Synth, Digidrummer, Looptastic, and Jamble Music Mashups are wildly popular. Every human is an artist in some way—as technology improves more people will find themselves creating, and collaborating remotely. Who’s at center stage now? Creative Commons-released music encourages open remixing via sites like JamGlue, ccMixter, Indaba Music, Jamendo, SoundCloud, and more. Maybe influenced by NIN, many musicians are releasing audio source files for open remixing, fan remix contests, remix apps, or fan music videos.

Based on estimated traffic data from compete.com, this visualization compares November 2009 website visits for 27 popular, legal, music stream-or-download destinations. The heat map is to scale—larger map areas represent higher website traffic. Green indicates positive growth in 2009. Red indicates negative growth in 2009. Hold your mouse over each area for stats. Use Ctrl + to zoom.

Pandora is the radio powerhouse, but MySpace Music, disturbingly, has the highest traffic, and MySpace acquired both Imeem and iLike this year. iTunes is omitted here because it’s not web-based—yet—but clearly it is widely used. The top three percentage gainers were Grooveshark, Lala, and Spotify. Grooveshark has shown the most consistent growth throughout the year, and let me tell you I think it’s going to be a Jaws-like monster (especially when it goes mobile). It delivers free full-on cloud-based streaming and user uploads. Grooveshark’s iPhone app is pending Apple’s approval, but I wonder if Apple will be reluctant to approve it because it would be sharp competition with iTunes and their newly acquired Lala. It’s no surprise that Google was also looking to buy Lala—maybe they’ll turn to bite Grooveshark. Grooveshark’s minimalistic home page is even Google-esque, and there’s something to be said for simple design. Being curious as to mobile applications’ influence on website traffic, I listed available mobile apps with the sortable data below.