Last month Heather Hopkins, our VP of Research in the UK illustrated how Hitwise data could reveal the “tipping point” of music talent (or when a band or artist would break into the mainstream) by looking at the traffic source of a band’s official website (here).
First, I’m a big fan of Malcolm Gladwell’s “Tipping Point,” and was very excited to see an example of his concepts play out in our data.
If you remember Gladwell’s book, one of the elements of a trend was the existence of Mavens and Connectors that facilitate the spread of that trend. If you view MySpace users as Connectors through their sharing and discussion of bands and music artists, then the pattern of visits from the network should give us a view as to what the next trend may be.
Consider the chart below, where I’ve compared the upstream percentage of visits going to the official website for the band “Fall Out Boy.”

The blue line represents upstream traffic from Google to the Fall Out Boys website, while the red line represents upstream traffic from MySpace. While Heather’s analysis focused on the rise of a new artist Lil’ Chris, this concept might also apply to the “trend” of a new album release.
In advance of the May 2005 release of “Under the Cork Tree” you can see that traffic from MySpace briefly surged before Google dominated the upstream, a sign that the band was becoming more popular in the mainstream as search queries increased. Now that the band is about to release a new album next month, the amplitude of visits from MySpace in advance of the release may be an indication of the conversation between the “Connectors” on MySpace. The amount of traffic coming from MySpace combined with a recent increase in visits to their site indicate positive signs for the upcoming release.
We’ll check back in early February to see how the album does on release.