Fans Search Bands on Wikipedia, Not Myspace

by Jarrett Martineau | March 25, 2008 at 09:05 am

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You might be wondering why fans are searching bands' Wiki pages instead of their MySpace profiles, that is, until you find yourself looking for some actual information about an artist.

I know it's cool to be a pop band and list your genre as "death metal", not to have an actual bio but instead to just post a classy b&w glossy band pic, and to list your band members as a paragraph-long quote from Rocky Balboa and your influences as "murder, blank looks on girls, knives". But c'mon, kids.

What if I just want to know the name of your new record? I'm going to Wikipedia.

New data collected by internet search engine Yahoo has revealed that music fans searching for information about bands choose to go a band's Wikipedia page rather than their MySpace page or official band website, despite MySpace offering streaming music from bands.

According to the data, after searching for a band name music fans head to a band’s Wikipedia page, searching there twice as often as they go to the band’s MySpace page.

The data results come despite the fact that MySpace claims to feature over three million band profiles with music, compared to Wikipedia’s “tens of thousands”.

Jay Walsh, communications manager for Wikipedia, said that website bosses were not considering adding music to artists’ pages on the site. "That's not what we're about," he said. "We're about knowledge. We're about bringing the reader to other free content – content they can use and enjoy without worrying about violating any copyrights."