Wikipedia beats MySpace for music information
Type any artist’s name in to a search engine such as Google or Yahoo! and more than likely the top three results will be their official Website, their MySpace page, and their Wikipedia entry. And as it turns out the latter is what most people now turn to for their facts and figures.
According to a recent study by Yahoo and Billboard (reported by Reuters), music fans are choosing the Wikipedia entry link over the artists’ own MySpace pages by a factor of more than two to one. Wikipedia is also more popular than artists’ official Websites.
John Lenac , Yahoo head of programming and label relations told Reuters:
“The interest that people had to go to MySpace to find out more about their favorite band is waning in favor of going to Wikipedia.”
The problem is a lot of artists aren’t taking the opportunity to exploit the popularity of Wikipedia, as while they spend time and money on a snazzy looking Website, and make sure their MySpace page is regularly updated and well maintained, few take any notice of what is being said about them on Wikipedia.
As to why new fans are choosing Wikipedia over MySpace or official Websites. It probably comes down to the fact that Wikipedia is impartial, and not just there for promotional purposes.
There is also the fact that with Wikipedia, you know exactly what you are going to get when you click a link. An official Website could be basic or flash heavy, have lots of statistics, or just tour dates.
While the MySpace page could end up being an almost unreadable jumble of ineligible text and images, songs, and fan comments which everyone could do without.
Of course while we all love MySpace, it appears that Wikipedia is better for some things.
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