About Hitwise

Hitwise is the leader in online competitive intelligence. Contact Hitwise to maximize your online marketing programs.

Hitwise Intelligence - Robin Goad - UK

Analyst Weblog

« What would a Google-Twitter marriage mean? | Shop opening times searches: an SEO opportunity? »

Festival fever and a good week for the NME

April 08, 2009

The sun may be shining, but it’s not quite time for the music festivals yet (it has to start raining for that to happen). However, following the release of the Reading and Leeds Festival line-ups in the NME last week, it is certainly festival season online. As the chart below illustrates, the number of search terms containing the word ‘festival’ has been increasing since Christmas, and notably spiked last week.

Having the exclusive on the line-up announcement was a coup for the NME, and it paid off in terms of traffic. UK Internet visits to the website increased by 37% last week and, as the chart below illustrates, it was the music magazine’s busiest week since last summer. In addition, ‘reading festival’ was the second biggest search term sending traffic to the NME last week after the navigational term ‘nme’. In total, six of the top 10 search terms sending traffic to the site were related to either the Leeds or Reading Festivals.

UK_Internet_traffic_to_NME_following_leeds_reading_festival_exclusive_chart.png

Looking at the sites visited after the NME last week, 36.7% of downstream traffic went to retail websites. Play.com, which has recently started selling tickets on its site, was the biggest beneficiary. The online entertainment retailer was the number one site visited after the NME last week, picking up 22.3% of the music magazine’s downstream traffic. The NME was also Play.com’s sixth biggest source of traffic last week, accounting for 1 in every 35 visits.

The NME also sent a significant amount of traffic to pure-play ticket resellers, which accounted for 9.5% of the site’s downstream traffic. Over half of those visits went to See Tickets, which was the second largest recipient of traffic from the NME last week after Play.com.

The Reading, Leeds and T4 On The Beach festivals were also the three most searched for music events on ticketing websites last week. This is first time that festivals have taken all of the top 3 positions since we started compiling the data for Music Week last year. For a full list of the top 20 music event (i.e. including festivals and single artist tours) searched on both primary (e.g. Ticketmaster) and secondary (e.g. Seatwave) ticketing websites, make sure to pick up Music Week magazine every Thursday!

Follow Hitwise UK on Twitter.