Which pages are most often looked at on this site?

Search this site with Google

Now that this site has been running for a few years it is possible to consider the pages that people access on the site as a rough indication of which topics are interesting to the readers. This page outlines some of the access levels of different parts of the site.

Page views of different page types

There are twelve different categories of pages on the site. The figure above shows how frequently they are accessed. The user's focus is clearly on songs (rather than albums). Interestingly users look for the songs of a particular year more that the songs of a particular artist, but they look for albums of a particular artist much more than the albums of a particular year. The high volume of traffic for the monthly number one pages surprised us, of course as purists we worry that our presentation of this data is too simplistic, most users clearly would rather have a simple picture than an accurate one.

Song Years

Page views of song years

The plot above shows how many times each of the "Song Year" pages were viewed. By far the most frequently viewed year was 1952 (the third box up in the 1950s, given that was both exactly 60 years ago and also that the British Queen's Diamond Jubilee was celebrated during the period being measured that is not a surprise. The low values for the 2000s was also expected, the site is not particularly focused on (or indeed good for) music after about 2005. Also the period before the 1930s is outside most people's interests. The high overall viewings of the 1950s and 1990s are a surprise (at least to us).

Page views of song decades

When the song decade pages are examined the peak in the 1990s is not present.

Song Artists

The following artist's pages were most commonly viewed:

# % Artist
1 0.18% The Beatles
2 0.17% Bing Crosby
3 0.14% Glenn Miller
4 0.12% Perry Como
5 0.12% Ray Charles
6 0.12% The Rolling Stones
7 0.11% Elvis Presley
8 0.10% Al Jolson
9 0.09% The Platters
10 0.09% The Four Tops
11 0.09% Tommy Dorsey & Frank Sinatra
12 0.09% Frank Sinatra
13 0.09% Nat King Cole
14 0.09% Bill Haley & His Comets
15 0.09% Jimmy Dorsey
16 0.08% Doris Day
17 0.08% Paul Whiteman
18 0.08% Louis Armstrong
19 0.08% Benny Goodman
20 0.08% The Andrews Sisters
21 0.07% Madonna
22 0.07% Jo Stafford
23 0.07% Tommy Dorsey
24 0.06% Three Dog Night
25 0.06% Guy Lombardo
26 0.06% Frankie Laine
27 0.06% Tony Bennett
28 0.06% Michael Jackson
29 0.05% Mariah Carey
30 0.05% Lionel Richie
31 0.05% Prince
32 0.05% Dinah Shore
33 0.05% Patti Page
34 0.05% Johnnie Ray
35 0.05% The Ink Spots
36 0.05% Billy Murray
37 0.05% Elton John
38 0.05% Guy Mitchell
39 0.05% Fred Astaire
40 0.05% The Mills Brothers
41 0.05% Vaughn Monroe
42 0.05% The Beach Boys
43 0.05% Duke Ellington
44 0.05% Dave Clark Five
45 0.05% Dean Martin
46 0.05% Artie Shaw
47 0.04% Billie Holiday
48 0.04% Bee Gees
49 0.04% American Quartet
50 0.04% The Everly Brothers

Song Titles

The following song titles were the most commonly viewed:

# % Title
1 0.105% You Belong to Me
2 0.062% In the Mood
3 0.054% When You Were Sweet Sixteen
4 0.053% Hold On
5 0.053% Over the Rainbow
6 0.052% Rock Around the Clock
7 0.051% Let's Dance
8 0.051% Crazy
9 0.047% Summertime
10 0.047% Buttons & Bows
11 0.046% Night & Day
12 0.045% Always
13 0.045% White Christmas
14 0.045% Hero
15 0.042% Alexander's ragtime band
16 0.042% Temptation
17 0.042% Swanee
18 0.041% I Love You
19 0.041% Riders in the Sky
20 0.041% Paradise

Monthly Number 1 Songs

Page views of Monthly Number 1 pages

The monthly number 1s pages are much more heavily used than we had expected. The plot above shows how frequently the pages were viewed across each of the 12 month's pages for the years 1940 to 2011. The high number views of January pages is an artifact of the navigation that tends to direct people via the January pages, the decade pages (Jan 1940, Jan 1950 etc) have high counts for the same reason. The peak between 1962 and 1995 can be interpreted to show that people really do look for the months they were born (assuming most users are 18-50 years old).

Albums

The album pages are visited about one quarter as many times as the corresponding song pages.

Page views of album years

The album year pages show the same peak in the 1990s as the song years do. For some reason 1993 was very popular. The decade plot also emphasises the 1990s. The most visited album artists were:

# Artist
1 Chage & Aska
2 Georges Brassens
3 The Beatles
4 Genesis
5 The Beach Boys
6 Guns n' Roses
7 Michael Jackson
8 James Last
9 Elvis Presley
10 Led Zeppelin
11 Richard Clayderman
12 Engelbert Humperdinck
13 The Rolling Stones
14 Britney Spears
15 Andy Williams
16 Pink Floyd
17 Whitney Houston
18 Tori Amos
19 Frank Sinatra
20 Neil Diamond

Why this list should be headed by what are (to us anyway) a pair of obscure Japanese and French acts is a mystery. At first we assumed these were high up because we only looked at a few day's logs, but extending the period made no difference.

General Points

As with all such reviews the impact of search engine crawlers and other web spiders have to be accounted for. When the site first started (in 2007) a large proportion of the accesses were from automated spiders. When we first started our estimate was that 90% of requests came from spiders, even as late as 2011 it was clear that this proportion was about 40%. However the significant growth in real use means that for the early part of 2012 the number is less than 7% (and continues to fall).

Page views of different pages

The picture above shows the number of pages that had smaller number of accesses over an extended period in the early part of 2012. The peak at 23 page views shows that many of the less frequented parts of the web site were mainly exercised by crawlers.

Access counts for some pages are very high

The most frequently accessed individual pages are those like the list of top songs, artists, titles and charts that are the normal way of getting into the site. As was shown above the annual song charts are the most popular type of data page. 1952 was far above all the other years, as has been mentioned above that is easy to explain. As the yellow line shows the impact of spiders on these results is so small as to be insignificant.

Here are the 50 most visited pages on the site:

# % Page
1 1.15% Song Charts
2 1.05% Song Years
3 0.93% Song Hits - 1952
4 0.91% Monthly Number 1s
5 0.85% Top Decade Artists
6 0.77% Top Songs
7 0.61% Song Hits - 1940
8 0.61% Top Song Artists
9 0.54% Song Hits - 1997
10 0.53% Album Sales
11 0.51% Top Song Titles
12 0.48% Song Hits - 1948
13 0.44% Song Hits - 1942
14 0.44% Song Hits - 1972
15 0.43% Decade Hits - 1950s
16 0.43% Song Hits - 1992
17 0.42% Song Hits - 1994
18 0.42% Song Hits - 1977
19 0.41% Song Hits - 1990
20 0.41% Song Hits - 1953
21 0.41% Song Hits - 1982
22 0.40% Decade Hits - 1930s
23 0.40% Song Hits - 1978
24 0.38% Song Hits - 1912
25 0.38% Song Hits - 1954
26 0.38% Song Hits - 1947
27 0.38% Song Hits - 1962
28 0.38% Song Hits - 1939
29 0.37% Song Hits - 1963
30 0.36% Song Hits - 1950
31 0.36% Decade Hits - 1940s
32 0.36% Song Hits - 1993
33 0.35% Song Hits - 1969
34 0.35% Song Hits - 1981
35 0.34% Song Hits - 1932
36 0.33% Decade Hits - 1960s
37 0.33% Song Hits - 1951
38 0.33% Album Charts
39 0.33% Decade Hits - 1920s
40 0.32% Song Hits - 1956
41 0.32% Song Hits - 1959
42 0.32% Song Hits - 1991
43 0.31% Song Hits - 1949
44 0.31% Song Hits - 1941
45 0.31% Song Hits - 1900
46 0.31% Song Hits - 1968
47 0.31% Song Hits - 1945
48 0.31% Song Hits - 1937
49 0.30% Song Hits - 1958
50 0.30% Song Hits - 1938

Country Profile

Another question is which countries visitors come from. We used a simple country identifier to map the IP addresses of users to countries. It managed to assign countries for more than 94% of our visitors over a two month period (Aug-Sep 2010). It showed that we had visits from more than 150 different countries in that period.

Proportion of visits by country

The top 50 countries are shown in the figure above. The US accounts for just under half of the activity on the site.

Visits by local time of day

As we would expect the number of visits varies according to the time of day in the visitor's country. The plot above shows that most users look at the site in the evening (5pm to 8pm) with fewest being active at 3am.

Visits by day of week

Surprisingly while the number of visits is greater at the weekend it is not that much greater. The plot above shows how the number of visits varied by week day over the two month period for the 10 most active countries.

Here is a list of the number of full page views by users within each country for a 5 month period during 2011.

Country Page Views Percent
United States 217667 41.8%
United Kingdom 88019 16.9%
Canada 35511 6.8%
Australia 21733 4.2%
Germany 15380 3.0%
France 9413 1.8%
Italy 7549 1.4%
Czech Republic 6531 1.3%
Belgium 5952 1.1%
Spain 5764 1.1%
Brazil 5484 1.1%
Russia 5191 1.0%
Netherlands 4926 0.9%
Philippines 4763 0.9%
Japan 4485 0.9%
South Africa 4442 0.9%
Ireland 4151 0.8%
South Korea 4007 0.8%
Mexico 3932 0.8%
Finland 3719 0.7%
New Zealand 3580 0.7%
Greece 3245 0.6%
India 3155 0.6%
Norway 2679 0.5%
Malta 2504 0.5%
Poland 2376 0.5%
Denmark 2339 0.4%
Sweden 2311 0.4%
Romania 2130 0.4%
Switzerland 2111 0.4%
Argentina 2054 0.4%
Turkey 1965 0.4%
Indonesia 1766 0.3%
Malaysia 1497 0.3%
Hungary 1493 0.3%
Austria 1465 0.3%
Portugal 1360 0.3%
Chile 1263 0.2%
Serbia and Montenegro 1254 0.2%
China 1252 0.2%
Singapore 1160 0.2%
Ukraine 1132 0.2%
Israel 1126 0.2%
Thailand 964 0.2%
Slovakia 914 0.2%
Slovenia 883 0.2%
Peru 856 0.2%
Hong Kong 754 0.1%
Croatia 661 0.1%
United Arab Emirates 577 0.1%
Uruguay 535 0.1%
Taiwan 518 0.1%
Bulgaria 457 0.1%
Mozambique 445 0.1%
Pakistan 439 0.1%
Costa Rica 412 0.1%
Bosnia and Herzegovina 360 0.1%
Lithuania 360 0.1%
Estonia 341 0.1%
Colombia 337 0.1%
Iceland 332 0.1%
Saudi Arabia 311 0.1%
Sri Lanka 309 0.1%
Egypt 285 0.1%
Vietnam 265 0.1%
Kuwait 262 0.1%
Mauritius 251 0.0%
Venezuela 209 0.0%
Georgia 200 0.0%
Latvia 197 0.0%
Kenya 190 0.0%
Nigeria 190 0.0%
Puerto Rico 185 0.0%
Macedonia [FYROM] 183 0.0%
Kazakhstan 180 0.0%
Paraguay 180 0.0%
Cyprus 153 0.0%
Guatemala 150 0.0%
Luxembourg 148 0.0%
Trinidad and Tobago 144 0.0%
Cambodia 134 0.0%
Lebanon 121 0.0%
Tunisia 121 0.0%
Jamaica 114 0.0%
Qatar 113 0.0%
Barbados 110 0.0%
Angola 103 0.0%
Algeria 102 0.0%
Belarus 95 0.0%
Morocco 94 0.0%
Dominican Republic 76 0.0%
Panama 76 0.0%
Ecuador 67 0.0%
Azerbaijan 63 0.0%
Bangladesh 61 0.0%
Oman 59 0.0%
Bolivia 58 0.0%
El Salvador 58 0.0%
Syria 57 0.0%
Cayman Islands 56 0.0%
Armenia 53 0.0%
Mongolia 53 0.0%
Namibia 53 0.0%
Albania 52 0.0%
Iraq 51 0.0%
Aruba 49 0.0%
Guyana 45 0.0%
Jordan 42 0.0%
Saint Vincent and the Grenadines 40 0.0%
Bahrain 38 0.0%
Sudan 38 0.0%
Ghana 36 0.0%
Uganda 35 0.0%
Palestinian Territories 34 0.0%
Bahamas 32 0.0%
Guam 32 0.0%
Brunei 30 0.0%
Laos 30 0.0%
Nicaragua 30 0.0%
Uzbekistan 28 0.0%
Netherlands Antilles 27 0.0%
Reunion 27 0.0%
Botswana 26 0.0%
U.S. Virgin Islands 26 0.0%
Liechtenstein 25 0.0%
Honduras 24 0.0%
Myanmar [Burma] 24 0.0%
Zimbabwe 24 0.0%
Maldives 23 0.0%
Madagascar 22 0.0%
Belize 20 0.0%
Bhutan 20 0.0%
Fiji 20 0.0%
Senegal 20 0.0%
Bermuda 19 0.0%
Macau 18 0.0%
Samoa 18 0.0%
Nepal 17 0.0%
Timor-Leste 17 0.0%
Tanzania 16 0.0%
Monaco 15 0.0%
Suriname 15 0.0%
Ethiopia 13 0.0%
Libya 13 0.0%
Moldova 13 0.0%
Guadeloupe 12 0.0%
Iran 12 0.0%
Dominica 11 0.0%
Papua New Guinea 11 0.0%
Zambia 10 0.0%
British Virgin Islands 9 0.0%
Cuba 9 0.0%
Vanuatu 9 0.0%
Gibraltar 8 0.0%
Rwanda 7 0.0%
Cameroon 6 0.0%
Djibouti 6 0.0%
Yemen 6 0.0%
Gambia 5 0.0%
Cote d'Ivoire 4 0.0%
Haiti 4 0.0%
Lesotho 4 0.0%
Guinea-Bissau 3 0.0%
Afghanistan 2 0.0%
Eritrea 2 0.0%
French Guiana 2 0.0%
Greenland 2 0.0%
Kiribati 2 0.0%
Kyrgyzstan 2 0.0%
Malawi 2 0.0%
New Caledonia 2 0.0%
Northern Mariana Islands 2 0.0%
Saint Lucia 2 0.0%
Turkmenistan 2 0.0%
Turks and Caicos Islands 2 0.0%
Anguilla 1 0.0%
Antigua and Barbuda 1 0.0%
Faroe Islands 1 0.0%
Guinea 1 0.0%
Liberia 1 0.0%
Norfolk Island 1 0.0%
Seychelles 1 0.0%
Solomon Islands 1 0.0%
Togo 1 0.0%
Tonga 1 0.0%

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