MySpace Music Appears To Be A Hit, Increases Traffic Tenfold Year-Over-Year

MySpace may not be the hottest thing in social networking any longer, with visitor numbers and page views decreasing at an alarming rate, but apparently its free music streaming service MySpace Music is still something of a hit.

According to Nielsen data (PDF) for June 2009, traffic to MySpace’s music subdomain has grown 190% since its launch in September 2008 and year-over-year traffic to the URL has increased a staggering 1,017%. This traffic includes at least one visit by our own MG Siegler, who was happy to learn Pearl Jam’s new single premiered exclusively on the service.

New MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta may be convinced users are not sure if the service is a destination for music or not, but if these numbers are correct it would make sense for him and the recently announced executive team for MySpace Music (which is a joint-venture with some major music labels and thus an independent entity) to dedicate a good deal of attention to it. Not that they’re haven’t been doing that up until now – in fact we mentioned earlier that the service has much improved since its unveiling and according to a recent Telegraph article the service is slated for a September launch in the UK.

Going back to the Nielsen report, the estimated 190 percent increase in traffic since the service’s debut translates to growth from 4.2 million unique visitors to 12.1 million in June 2009, with traffic to the subdomain having increased 1,017 percent year-over-year. When comparing unique visitors for MySpace Music to other sites within the music category, it ranked third only behind AOL Music and Yahoo! Music but ahead of other popular music sites like MTV Networks Music, MSN Music and Pandora.

According to Nielsen, people between the ages of 12 and 17 were 2.4 times more likely than the average active Internet user to visit MySpace Music on the subdomain. Visitors between 18 and 24 were 2.2 more likely than the average Internet user to visit the site in June.