I know how most of you hate these surveys, but I promise you that this one is not for gathering and selling any of your information. I’m just trying to fine tune Headphone Commute and concentrate on areas that may require improvement. There’s no need to waste my time and energy publishing on myspace if no one reads it there, right? So if you can spare a few seconds and just click through these questions, you would help me take Headphone Commute to the next level…
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UPDATE: THE RESULTS ARE IN!
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I really appreciate all of you who took the time to answer these ten questions! These results will really help me optimize my time. I’ve received an overwhelming amount of feedback from all of you, and here are some of the findings that I’d like to share with you!
1. Most of you found Headphone Commute through a variety of places, although a nice chunk of you still got here through Google (of course), about 15% still surf over via last.fm, 10% from Facebook, and the rest via HC reviews on Amazon.com, Discogs, The Music Lobby, and a few of my favorite podcasts – Electronic Explorations and Solipsistic Nation.
2. You guys read the reviews directly on the site – so I’ll keep pumping energy into that, with 27% of you reading via Facebook, and 20% via your favorite RSS reader. Pretty much no one reads on myspace, as I expected, so I’ll probably stop publishing there, as this will save me a ton of time!
3. You do read every few days (35%), so I’ll keep pumping out the content. And even though 20% of you read HC daily, I’ll admit – my goal for 2010 is quality, not quantity.
4. Your favorite feature is, of course, album reviews. 20% of you love everything, with Two and a Half Questions taking the third and fourth place. Only 8% like Label Profiles – to me that means that I should instead make that a bit more exciting. Right?
5. Your favorite feature of the reviews are the references to other artists. This was an overwhelming response, peaking at 48%! I would have thought it’s audio samples, which came in second at 24%. Not surprisingly, the recently added youtube videos are only liked by 3%, so I’ll probably curb my time in digging those up. A few nice ‘other’ comments that warmed my heart included “quality of writing” and “intelligence”. Thank you for that.
6. Oooh, this is my favorite question, regarding the favorite genres. Here’s the roundup in descending order of most votes: Ambient, Minimal and Experimental, IDM, and Modern Classical, with the rest (10%) loving everything! It’s wonderful to know that HC attracts a sophisticated and discerning audience. Not that there’s anything wrong with other genres! At 5% of votes we still captured shoegaze, post-rock, dubstep, trip-hop and breakcore.
7. This one was interesting as well. Regarding questions I should ask the artists more about, you wanted to hear about their production techniques (25%) followed by musical influences (23%), anything at all (17%) and upcoming releases (12%). Some of you recommended that I should also ask about the studio setup, how the artist got started, and their motivation.
8. I’ve got hundreds of submissions on artists that you guys want me to interview. I don’t even know how I’m going to go about summarizing this one. But be assured that I’ll read each one!
9. So who is lurking at these pages? 34% of you turned out to be musical connoisseurs, with 22% being artists. We also have 20% casual listeners, while the rest are DJs, label owners, and other journalists. A few ‘others’ made me smile as well – these are “electronic music addicts”, “half assed artists”, “music geeks”, with one “human”, and even one “motherf—er”. Nice one!
10. The last open ended question allowed you to leave me anything at all. I’m not surprised some of you want more free music – I’ll try my best to provide that when I can [HC mixes are your best option]. But most of you simply thanked me for my work and encouraged to just keep on going! That’s exactly what I wanted to hear! Thank you for all your kind words – this is precisely the kind of thing that fuels my desire to share the words about good music!
