Buy Albums from Artists You Love

Many of us love music to some degree. After reading this article, I hope you'll consider buying an album or two from the artists you love. Fans really are the only way that musicians can "stay in business."

An article on The Root investigated where your money really goes when you buy an album. Their research found that, on average, for every $1,000 of music sold, the average musician makes $23.40. So if a band's asking for $5 a CD, they make $23.40 after selling 200 CDs. Most local bands who aren't on labels don't even pay their members, as they need to cover the cost of gas, recording, lodging, food, merchandise, etc.

Often people are blinded by Lady GaGa's insane sales numbers or the blinged-out lifestyles of popular artists, but really, according to Nielsen, only 2.1% of albums released in 2009 sold 5,000 copies -- that's about 2,050 records that passed the 5k mark.

Check out the full article HERE, and please remember to support artists you love, especially local ones, or soon they may no longer be around!

Blogger Demographics

I stumbled upon a post on Social Media Today that outlined a collection of data gathered by Sysomos. The fine people at Sysomos analyzed more than 100 million blog posts that had information like age, gender and location available. Their findings were, to me, a mix of common assumption and interesting surprises.

One of the least surprising findings was that more than half of the 100 million bloggers were between the ages of 21 and 35. But it was nice to see that there are at least 7.1 million blogs authored by folks 51 and older. :) I wonder what they write about...

One of the most surprising findings for me was that the gender of bloggers is pretty evenly distributed, with just slightly more than half of all bloggers female. I'm not sure which gender I thought would blog more, but I didn't anticipate such balanced results.
Another area researched was location. Sysomos found that the U.S. is home to the majority of bloggers with 29.22%. Not necessarily surprising, but what may interest you is the large share gap between the No. 1 and No. 2 countries. The U.K. wins the No. 2 seat, but owns just 6.75% share of bloggers. Japan, Brazil and Canada follow respectively.

Within the U.S., California ranked as the No. 1 state with 14.1% of all American bloggers calling CA home. NY was next with 7.12%, and Illinois ranked No. 9 with 2.14% share of U.S. bloggers.

Rolling Stone Readers Rank The Beatles as Most Influential to Rock

In the reader survey detailed in the April 29th issue of Rolling Stone, 67% of the 1,744 readers that responded believe The Beatles to be the most influential group in the history of rock and roll. I, of course, agree.

The survey also revealed these nuggets about the responders:

• If required to give up all forms of entertainment for one week except for one, 64.7% of readers opted to keep music.
• The average number of songs on their iTunes libraries was 6,370.
• Readers spent an average of 11.5 hours per week listening to music.

You can check out details of Rolling Stone’s reader demographics at http://www.srds.com/mediakits/rollingstone/demographics.html

I found another article about these results on Radio Survivor that you can check out at http://www.radiosurvivor.com/2010/04/28/more-than-half-of-rolling-stone-readers-still-listen-to-music-radio/