A recent Reuters article discussed the missed opportunity by the music industry to capitalize upon searches for bands & artists that result in a visit to Wikipedia. A typical search result on a band or musician will display their own website, MySpace profile, and Wikipedia entry. For the majority of the most-searched bands & artists, these results are the most visited websites, with some variations in the rankings. A quick look at the websites visited immediately following a search for the top ten most-searched bands & artists for the 4 weeks ending March 29, 2008 shows that for 8 out of 10 of them, Wikipedia is more commonly receiving traffic from the searches than MySpace (although MySpace also ranks high for many as well).

I also looked at an aggregate of 300 band & artist names to compare the weekly share of traffic going to Wikipedia and MySpace following a search on any of those 300 terms. For the week ending March 29, 2008, Wikipedia was receiving 2.4 times more traffic than MySpace from searches on the 300 bands & artists. One argument could certainly be that this could change when looking out into the long tail and more artists are added, but this does provide some insight into where consumers are seeking information for popular artists today. Additionally, Wikipedia receives more significantly traffic from search than MySpace (72% vs. 19% in March 2008), so users may also be going directly to MySpace to search for specific bands.

In light of this opportunity there are a couple things to consider – the first is obvious – bands should have a Wikipedia page. Once that is complete, there are two areas on the Wikipedia that artists, their managers, and record labels can influence (key word here is influence rather than actually editing the page) to help promote their artists with the most current information – Notes/References and External Links. Within the Notes/References section, any relevant content such as record reviews, news, or tour announcements should become part of the profile. External links can be used to promote the official sites, large profile pages (e.g. MySpace, Yahoo! Music), biographies, and solo/side projects. Another opportunity is provide any information on cross-over into other careers such as acting, writing, and modeling.

Heather Dougherty

Heather Dougherty is Director, Research at Hitwise. This piece originally appeared on Hitwise's analyst blog here.

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