FYI Readership: Facts & Figures
A review of FYI Music analytics indicates that 700,000-plus page views were generated by readers in 2019.
By David Farrell
A review of FYI Music analytics indicates that 700,000-plus page views were generated by readers in 2019.
Of these, 61-percent were based in Canada, 21-percent in the US, and the balance spread across the map with readers in France, the UK, Australia, Germany, Norway, India, the Netherlands, and Brazil filling out the top 10 location visits.
Stories about people were overwhelmingly the most popular, whether living or dead.
Among the most popular, often shared across social media, and in no order, were stories about Jann Arden, Jack Scott, Bryan Adams, Deane Cameron, Daddy Yankee and Snow, Danny Michel, Corey Hart, the Bachman/Cummings Walk of Fame reunion concert, Jon Box, Sandra Faire, the Dead South, Paola Simonetto, Bobby Gale, Kelly Jay, Bill Evans, Chad Kroeger, Triumph, Hunter Brothers, Ralph Murphy, Mark Elliot, Sam Feldman, Lesley Sole and Terri Michael, Donna Grantis, Dave Bookman, Joe Hall, Arnold Gosewich, Graham Powers, Mitch Podolak, Brian Henderson, and the Slaight Family Foundation.
Inexplicably, a 2016 review of Quebec composer Eduardo Noya’s theme for Versailles (Now and Forever, I Am Your King), a $33M spectacle drama about Louis XV1’s opulent palace life, is one of the most-read stories of the past three years. For the longest time, the FYI review was the top-ranked Noya search story on Google. Three years later it is in 2nd place behind a SOCAN feature published the same year. Even in 2019, it ranked as one of the top 10 page views on FYI.
Of the 150 odd Track of the Day features penned by Kerry Doole, the most shared in the year was Leave It All Behind, the advance single from the Headstones' album, PeopleSkills. Readers and fans shared this across Facebook a thousand times and the page count for the song was equally notable.
Apart from stories about people, airplay charts ranked high as a favoured landing page during 2019. Readers also favoured features and news stories about the business of music.
Danny Michel’s sobering essay about the difficulties of earning a living as a musician in the age of streaming, first published on his Facebook page, won wide praise and generated a great number of page views. More than 6K readers shared the story from the site to their Facebook pages.
An archived story from 2015, penned by Bill King, with contributions from a who’s who in Canada’s music business, continues to have a life of its own. Great Instrumental Breaks That Made Songs Into Killer Hits had over 2K page views in 2019.
The Nicholas Jennings’ story behind the Walk of Fame concert reuniting Randy Bachman and Burton Cummings clocked a lot of page views and generated more than 2K Facebook shares from the site.
Showing the power of fandom, a short news item reporting the fact that Bryan Adams had a No. 1 album with Shine A Light, in May, generated more than 10K Facebook shares.
Another short story, about the 30th anniversary of the Harris Institute, generated well over 600 shares on Facebook as well as ranking as one of the 50th most-read stories of the year.
Curiosity about ole co-founder Robert Ott’s re-emergence and launching of RJO Enterprises in June of last year also made the top 50 list. Stories about entrepreneurs, and specially those with a winning streak, earn high rankings.
Another favourite was Vel Omazic’s 2019 informative and highly researched update of a 2017 feature explaining the nuances and complexities of Canada’s royalty ecosystem.
A Dec. 18 story about proposed US border regulations, became one of the most-read stories of the year and has already generated 1K Facebook shares.
There were many other stories and features that generated interest and were fanned out across social media by readers, but we just wanted to share a taste of the year in review. The regular Music News, Music Biz Headlines, Media Beat, and Track of the Day columns, and regular news reporting generate strong interest, but not on the same scale as stories about people and money.
With my daily email count now surpassing 300, it is hard to keep track of all the information—but I do what I can and the general feedback suggests what the FYI team does is greatly appreciated.
— Addendum: Archived stories prior to 2019 in many cases have had share counts on Facebook deleted owing to several short-term outages on the site. Also, metrics showing shares across LinkedIn, Twitter and e-mail have never been quantified.
