Top 10 music sites — on “total attention”
Based on the definition of total attention in my last post, I thought it’d be interesting to rank the top 10 music sites. To do so, I multiplied “visits” by “pages/visit” (both per compete.com). Assuming these numbers are accurate, the product is the total page views served up in a month and should give a sense of both the total amount of consumer attention commanded by a site and the visual ad “avails” on that site.
Here’s the rankings that result, and to provide a sense of relative magnitude, I’ve pegged Live365’s pages at 1.00:
- imeem (550m pages / 12x size of Live365)
- Project Playlist (378m / 8x)
- Live365 (47m / 1.00)
- Pandora (46m / 0.98 )
- Napster (30m / 0.65)
- Rhapsody (23m / 0.50)
- Last.fm (18m / 0.39)
- iLike (17m / 0.37)
- Jango (11m / 0.23)
- Qloud (6m / 0.13)
I’m still a bit surprised by this, as I’d have imagined the social networking plays in this group (Last.fm, iLike, Jango) would generate relatively more page views than the radio-focused plays (Live365, Pandora).
Note that the on-demand and primarily subscription-based services (Napster and Rhapsody, which now have an ad-based, or at least free, web offering) fall smack in the middle on this measure. As with a ranking by unique visitors, imeem and Project Playlist still come out on top, by a wide margin.
I’d love to hear others’ thoughts on these rankings, and I’m happy to send anyone who’s interested the spreadsheet I used to calculate these rankings.
Filed under: discovery, valuation, ventures | 7 Comments
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Sampled + Sorted 
Wow…
so by this measure imeem is almost as big as the rest of the top 10 combined
Maybe you could use the data from quantcast as an alternative data source to compare against.
Good idea – I’ll try Quantcast next time ’round.
I’d say your intuition is right, and those numbers are probably wildly wrong. I think Last.FM gets more pageviews then that and as a specific example, according to compete.com The Hype Machine would have 1.4 million pageviews (using your metric of visitors x pages/visit) but we are at about 8 million (so says Google Analytics).
I guess the real question is, are those numbers still accurate relative to each other or would there would be some major shifts in rank if you had access to real data.
Been enjoying your posts, thanks!
– Taylor McKnight
Thanks Taylor!
I suspect you’re correct on that point. Back at Live365, our numbers per any external metric (Arbitron, Comscore, etc) were always way less than our internal logs show.
Since I don’t have access to private data, my hope is that all players are off by proportionate amounts. I realize this may or may not be true, tho.
I also think Compete significantly understates Last.fm (since omits international users) and iLike (since omits widget-based access on FB and other social platforms).
most of qloud’s traffics is inside social networks and thus not tracked