Music & the Entertainment Ecosystem

The clean, crisp lines demarcating the radio stations we listen to, or the television programs we watch on free-to-air, tend to blur and mutate the more our media behaviour migrates online. In other words, taking a screeching left off the autobahn, the viewer becomes immersed in a very dynamic, less predictable media-experience.

What compounds the issue of unpredictability, and at times confusion, is the lack of comprehensive data on comparative behaviour across websites. In other words, online media consumption is still overwhelmingly assessed by singular points of ‘engagement’ rather than in the context of the person’s repertoire of online publications and applications.

In the context of online music audiences, the plethora of music-related websites makes the measurement and understanding of engagement even more acute.

In Australia, our understanding, let alone analysis, of these online eco-systems, or repertoires, is very limited, despite having evolved through a combination of habit, relevancy and external promotion. We know, for example, that just over 390,000 Australians visit The Pirate Bay in a single month, and that about 226,000 will visit the Take40 website, but in the context of an online entertainment category with a reach of 9.4m Australians (source: Nielsen Online), where individuals spend on average three hours a month in the category, are these audience figures respectable, impressive or positively underwhelming?

Each month, Australians visit more than 450 entertainment-type websites, and this ignores the plethora of social media, sports and news sites which tend to leverage the entertainment dollar. Given this level of fragmentation, a monthly audience of almost a quarter of million visitors seems more than respectable.

In the US, understanding media relativities in a digital context is clearly more mature than what we commonly experience in Australia. A quick snapshot of Pandora listeners aged between 18 and 34, for example, throws up some fascinating site affinities.

While shared audiences between Last.fm, Radio Time, emusic and Limewire seem self-evident, there are also some strong audience relationships with the likes of Music of Faith, All Gospel Lyrics and the entertainment sites, Bet.com, VH1 and Hulu (Source: Quantcast).

For MTV.com viewers, again aged between 18 and 34, the online repertoire is a little more secular. Sites like Bossip, Skyrock, Atlantic Records, Perez Hilton and NY Mag are all regarded as having some of the highest affinity scores with the cable group’s online viewers.

Locally, the situation is made more complicated by the regular ‘leakage’ of many Australian music consumers to a number of high profile international sites. Perez Hilton pulls in approximately 320,000 local visitors each month, compared with 215,000 for the Huffington Post, and the 3.6m Australians who switch onto the emerging social media giant RockYou each month.

Understanding online music consumption, let alone the potential adoption of music-related applications and technologies, is near ineffectual without better understanding the market’s overall immersion in entertainment content and the predominantly international brands that have secured local engagement on a frequent basis.