Music Fans Choose Wikipedia Over MySpace

If you’ve ever sworn over your fifth scotch that nothing in the world will ever be more popular than MySpace, then bottoms up, because you need something to wash those words down with. It seems music fans have found a resource they like more: Wikipedia. Yes, it may only be because Ramones fans enjoy inscribing bonehead witticisms on Seal’s page, but if anything can foreshadow the downfall of the world’s biggest online high-school, dammit, it’s newsworthy.

Information exported from the search gurus at Yahoo! shows that for any given artist search, three links come up most frequently – the artist’s official web site, their MySpace page, and their Wikipedia entry. Within the last six months, they say, the number of clicks landing music fans on Wikipedia has surpassed the number of clicks going to MySpace, leaving the people’s encyclopedia leading the teenage comment-fiesta by a factor of more than two-to-one, Reuters reported Friday.

The reasons make sense: when you’re looking for straightforward information on Led Zeppelin – for example, how the famous opening drum track of “When the Levee Breaks” was recorded in a three-story stairwell – you don’t want the hyped, promotional garbage slathered over their band page, and you don’t want the avalanche of slow-loading images and video clips covering their MySpace page. As web promotions consultant Jason Feinberg said, it’s all about the straight game.

“[Wikipedia is] so clear, so concise, and it's standardized. That's something I think is a draw over MySpace, where you never quite know the experience you're going to get.” Feinberg said to Reuters. “Especially these days when the Internet is full of artists trying to essentially ram their message down your throat, I think a fan is a lot more receptive to a simple, no-hype approach."

The obvious advantage MySpace has is streaming music; but who needs that, when you’re a die-hard fan with the songs already permanently etched into your brain? As far as I am concerned, the public has spoken. Now let’s take all of those talented human resources spent on approving image comments, and re-rout them into something worthwhile, like curing cancer, or figuring out how Vampire Weekend has managed to take over the world.

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