We do not recommend Sing365.
According to Hitwise, these are the top 10 ‘Music’ sites in Australia for July 2009.
- MetroLyrics
- Ultimate Guitar Archive
- Last FM
- A-Z Lyrics Universe
- ninemsn Music
- Sing365.com
- LyricsMode.com
- Take40
- Lyrics007.com
- inthemix.com.au
Source: Hitwise Australia - www.hitwise.com.au*
Five Reactions
- Are MetroLyrics paying royalties to publishers? The content of the most popular music site in Australia (and 5 of the top 10 sites) is strictly owned by the publisher. Are publishers aware of this?
- Last.FM, I love you. This list is dominated by shitty, ugly, cheap sites and yet you (and In The Mix) stand alone as true, community driven, music loving sites.
- People looking for music online are looking for lyrics (5 of the top 10 sites) - not music.
- NineMSN Music. Why is the 5th most popular music site in Australia never talked about, referenced, discussed, loved or hated in any of the conversations I have about music online? Are all the people obsessing about Hype Machine, Pitchfork and NME missing the point?
- Bravo In The Mix. A true Australian music community that clearly matters to a lot of people.
In Detail
*These rankings are based on market share of visits to websites in these industries by Australian Internet Users. MySpace isn’t included because its categorised as a social networking site. According to Hitwise:
“The ‘Music’ category “features all sites that are primarily concerned with music. Record companies, music download sites, music stores, band sites, fan sites and information about the playing of instruments are examples of such sites.”
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Neil Ackland 09.07.09 at 9:37 am
Interesting and slightly bizarre list.
I’ll attempt to answer Reaction 4. Total visits as the key metric is only half the story. What you find when digging a little deeper is that ninemsn music has very low engagement. Frequency, Average Session Duration and Page Duration are all very low according to Netratings Market Intelligence (which is the tool media buyers are using).
What this tells us is that being a part of the beast that is The Fix means that if just some of the literally millions of people a day that go to ninemsn on their lunch break hit a music story they get loads of traffic. The point is that visitors may not even know they are going there and are not specifically seeking it out as a destination. It’s part of a bigger, broader, entertainment experience.
Because you clicked on a story about Lady Gaga’s Vagina (http://music.ninemsn.com.au/blog.aspx?blogentryid=454836&showcomments=true), it doesn’t make you a music fan
Nick, I’d love to see the list if you took out the lyrics sites and anything that wasn’t really a music content site.
Matt 09.07.09 at 12:00 pm
I love a list but I hate this one. We have only ourselves to blame though http://www.dpdialogue.com.au/zakazukhazoo/the-top-10-music-sites-in-australia/
Ford 09.07.09 at 3:11 pm
first.
simon 09.07.09 at 11:29 pm
people obsess over NME?
Kripy 09.08.09 at 1:50 pm
The title of this article is a little confusing Nick. To me this looks like the Top 10 “Music” websites visited by Australian browsers and not the Top 10 Australian “Music” websites. MetroLyrics is UK based, Ultimate Guitar Archive is based in the Netherlands, and so on. These websites are not hosted in Australia which by my definition is an Australian site. And should we go further and say the website needs to have a .AU domain to qualify? That’s the top 10 I’d really like to see: the Top 10 Australian “Music” websites. I think you’ve covered some of these in your Australian Top 25 Music Blogs post but this is using a custom category.
Nick 09.16.09 at 9:35 am
@Kripy - I’m on it.