June 23, 2008

Festivals and band searches

Glastonbury - festival of mud and music – officially starts on Friday, and the fastest moving search term sending traffic to our Music category last week was ‘glastonbury line up 2008’. It’s likely that some of these searches relate to the ‘controversy’ surrounding this year’s choice of headline acts, which many have claimed are not as popular with festival goers as in previous years. This criticism has also been levelled at other festivals and a number have had trouble selling tickets.

To test this theory we created two search term portfolios, each containing a list of the 42 headline acts at this year’s main festivals (Glastonbury, Leeds/Reading, T In The Park, Download, V festival and O2 Wireless). We then charted the volume of searches for these portfolios over the last 12 months, with the intention of creating a popularity index of this year’s bands vs. last year’s. As you can see from the chart below, it does indeed seem that last year’s bands were more popular around festival time. This time last year (i.e. the week before Glastonbury), there were 48% more searches for the headline acts (blue line) than there have been this year (orange line).

Looking at the individual bands’ performance within their portfolio* gives another clue as to why festivals may be struggling to sell tickets. This year’s most searched for headliners are Neil Diamond, Girls Aloud and Amy Winehouse, while last year’s were the somewhat more festival friendly My Chemical Romance, Artic Monkey’s and Fall Out Boy.

* Note: the share of searches data in the table above refers to that artist's share of searches within that year's headline acts portfolio during the 4 pre-Glastonbury weeks. So, for example, the term 'neil diamond' accounted for 11.8% of searches for the 42 2008 festival headliners during the 4 weeks ending 21 June 2008; whereas the term 'my chemical romance' accounted for 10.1% of searched for the 42 2007 festival headliners during the 4 weeks ending 16 June 2007.

Posted by Robin Goad at 04:00 PM
Posted to Music | Search

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Posted by: Chris Angus at June 24, 2008 02:19 PM

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