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Hitwise Intelligence - Heather Hopkins - UK

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MySpace Music & Anticipating Bebo Music

June 20, 2006

Main stream media (MSM) are covering Bebo and MySpace in record numbers. Simon Garfield wrote a piece in The Observer on Sunday and Tom Braithwaite had one in today's FT. Both are worth a read as a round-up of what's happening in this space. Simon mentions in his article that Bebo is planning to launch a music offering in the next couple of weeks.This along with Michael Birch's acceptance speech last week, which Tom reports was "in your face, MySpace!", spurred me to take another look at MySpace music.

First the league table... Last week, MySpace ranked #2 in the Hitwise Net Communities and Chat category with 12.59% market share of UK visits; Bebo ranked #3 with 11.81% of visits. (The #1 site was MSN Messenger which saw its visits increase after an email blast to Hotmail users). The gap in share of visits is closing between the two sites and Bebo has passed MySpace in average session duration, share of page views and share of internet searches for the brand.

A search term gap analysis between Bebo and MySpace reveals that whilst the highest volume search terms sending visits to MySpace are for bands and artists, the highest volume search terms sending visits to Bebo are for individuals with profiles on Bebo. For example, "lily allen", "lilly allen", "atreyu" "automatic" and "jose gonzalez" were among the top terms sending visits to MySpace in the past four weeks. (Though Jose Gonzalez' MySpace page is hardly active).

MySpace Music has taken the #2 ranking within the Hitwise Music category and was the #3 downstream site from MySpace last week, receiving 3.26% of visits from the site.

Top 10 Music Websites, Based on Share of UK Visits, Week to 17th June 2006
Music Rankings.png

Last week, MySpace accounted for 4.9% of upstream visits to Music sites while Bebo accounted for just 0.086% of visits. Whether Bebo will manage to gain market share to compete with MySpace in music remains to be seen. In the meantime, UK artists looking for an audience are sure to benefit.

Share of UK Upstream Visits to Music Sites from MySpace and Bebo

Bebo v MySpace Music.png