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?