Sunday, September 22, 2013

My 1000th Post!

Yes, it's true. Not counting those drafts I did not complete and did not post, this is the 1000th post I have put up on The Music Salon. At about 500 words per post (just a rough guess) that amounts to 500,000 words. If the average novel is about 100,000 words, then I have written the equivalent of five novels since June of 2011 when I started the blog.

My statistics have climbed steadily from a minuscule 300 page views the first month to around 12,500 in the last month. That is tiny compared to the big bloggers like Instapundit or the Daily Kos which both get hundreds of thousands of visits every day. But they talk about things of general interest while I remain focussed on music. Apart from occasionally writing something that I hope someone, somewhere will find provocative, I really don't make any effort to win readers except by trying to talk about music in the best way I know how.

One interesting thing about the blog is the number of readers I have that are from non-English speaking countries: six out of the top ten. The USA is first, probably due to heavy internet use, but here are the top ten:

United States

Russia

United Kingdom

Germany

Mexico

Canada

France

Australia

Sweden

Philippines


Some of those may surprise you. Why Russia? Probably a couple of reasons: one is that Russia is hugely important for classical music. If I just mention Stravinsky, Shostakovich, Rostropovich, Oistrakh, Richter and Sokolov, that should give an indication. Second, I write a lot about Shostakovich. Why the UK? Also a big music center. London has probably the most active concert scene in the world. Germany? Also a musical super-power. Mexico? Probably because I live here. Canada, probably because I write about Canada from time to time as I am Canadian. France, Australia, Sweden and the Philippines are also important music centers, especially for the guitar, and I am a classical guitarist.

One thing that helps the wide geographic popularity of the blog is that music does tend to transcend language. Another is that there is a translation gadget on the right hand side that can translate the whole blog into hundreds of languages!

So thank you to all my readers and welcome to many more readers. It is immensely gratifying to me that so many people from so many different places have a deep and abiding love of music.

Here is my performance of Asturias by Albéniz with photos of that part of Spain.


UPDATE: I forgot to mention that if you have any comments on the blog in general, don't hesitate. Or if you want to let me know what kind of posts you enjoy reading, please do so. More on pop music? Less on pop music? More or less on Beethoven/Shostakovich/Bach? More on composition? Just leave me a comment.

4 comments:

Shantanu said...

Something about Haydn symphonies? There's some interesting stuff like how this symphony ends (you probably know already):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symphony_No._45_(Haydn)

Bryan Townsend said...

Shantanu, that's a great idea! The Haydn symphonies are fantastic pieces and I think I have hardly mentioned them on the blog.

Rickard said...

Too bad there are so few commentators.

Bryan Townsend said...

I've puzzled over this myself. One reason I do provocative posts occasionally is to spark comments. The number of people reading grows and grows. But for some reason, the only people who comment are the ones who are really serious music lovers. Perhaps we should be grateful!