Google shows a classical downtrend. Sorta.
If you didn’t already know of it’s existence, Google has a fascinating little toy called trends, which shows how the volume for a particular search term has changed over time. For example, if you search for tennis, you get a series of peaks corresponding to each of the grand-slam tournaments. Depressingly, if you search for classical music, you can see a pretty steady decline for the last few years. Incidentally it also lists the regions for which this search term is the most popular. In this case:
- Philippines
- India
- United Kingdom
- Australia
- United States
- Canada
- Netherlands
- Germany
Since I often pretend I am a proper scientist it’s only fair to compare this against the search term music, which also has a decreasing trend, Given that I don’t think music itself is dying out, perhaps we should treat these results with caution (well, we blatantly should anyway, since we don’t really know how the volume is measured)
Looking at the individual composers is sort of interesting (and I emphasize “sort of”). Apparently, Spain and Australia are pretty fond of Shostakovich, but not quite as much as the UK. Some are predictable: Poland likes Chopin; Austria likes Mozart; Britain likes Britten. But Norway likes Stravinsky.
Searching for mp3 is also interesting. See the peaks around Christmas? I bet that’s everyone who just got an mp3 player and are trying to work out what it does and where to get stuff to put on it.
Anyone else find any interesting trends?
October 22nd, 2007 at 8:07 am
Not only don’t we know how the volume is measured, we have to keep in mind that what is being measured (assuming the measurement itself makes sense) is searches on a particular search engine (albeit the most popular one) for a particular character string.
Does the decrease mean a loss of interest in classical music? Does it mean that folks already know as much as they want to about it and are not searching as much for information? Does it mean that people are searching more and more for particular subjects in the general category of classical music? Who knows?
The trend for Beethoven seems to be fairly constant, with ups and downs. Apparently a slight decrease overall, but I don’t know if it’s very significant. He’s most popular in Chile (?), followed by Austria, but the U.S. is nowhere on the list. But these results may be contaminated by dog lovers interested in the “Beethoven” movies.
October 23rd, 2007 at 9:27 pm
Great points!
I was thinking exactly along those lines when searching for “music”. That’s the kind of search term a person would use only when they know absolutely nothing about using the internet to find music. It’s tricky to get any hard evidence from an exercise like this.
When you do a search for Bach you get all kinds of stories about David Hasselhoff and his ex-wife Pamela Bach. Eeugh.