The Brit Awards take place tomorrow evening and there are three awards up for the public vote: best British Breakthrough Act, best British Live Act, and best British Single. The latter is tricky to analyze using search data, but I thought I’d have a look at the first two. The chart below illustrates weekly UK Internet searches for the five acts nominated for British Breakthrough Act in the weeks since the nominations were announced.

It looks like Leona Lewis may well have that one sewn up, particularly as most of the searches are ‘positive’ – i.e. the kind of searches that imply people searching for her will also be voting for her. Also in her favour is the fact that her homepage was the second ranked artist website sending traffic to the Brit Awards homepage last week (as illustrated in the table below). However, Mika’s (pictured above playing at the Wiltern in Los Angeles last week) was the third ranked artist website, so he probably provides the X-Factor winner with her toughest competition.

Take That’s homepage was the artist site sending most traffic to the Brit Awards website last week, and the reformed and rejuvenated boy band are one of the contenders in the running for the British Live Act award. However, rockers Muse were the most searched for of the nominees last week, and the Arctic Monkeys have also put in a strong showing. The live award looks like it will be a close run thing between those 3 bands, and I doubt that indie underdogs the Kaiser Chiefs or Klaxons have much of a chance.

The Brits reward artists that have done well over the past year, but as anyone knows the smart place to look for the latest new talent is MySpace. The table below illustrates the top 10 band names sending UK search traffic to MySpace, and it makes interesting reading. The percentages illustrate the amount of traffic that went to key ‘music sites’ for each search term for the 4 weeks ending 16 February.

We’re written about the importance of MySpace for new artists in the past, but this table really brings it home: on average, MySpace captured nearly 40% of searches for these ten acts. However, while the significance of MySpace was relatively consistent across the board, the importance of the artists’ homepages varies greatly. Another interesting data point is the pull of YouTube and Wikipedia. Both are important sources of information about new bands, but the online encyclopedia currently receives 50% more traffic than the video site.

The list is also a nice riposte to those that have criticized the blandness of this year’s Brit nominees. Leona Lewis, Mika and Take That may be the front runners on Wednesday, but fingers crossed we’ll see Vampire Weekend, Hot Chip and the Ting Tings collecting gongs next year.

Robin Goad

Robin Goad is Research Director, Hitwise UK. This piece was originally published on Hitwise analyst blog here.

Image By Joakim Baage