100K clicks

From the last one year, I got a new passion - taking video clips of the (mostly) hindustani music concerts that I attend and post them on youtube. I posted a few clips and people started liking it and I started getting a ton of mails thanking me for posting. I suddenly realized that classical music lovers, that are living outside India, rely solely (well almost) on youtube or similar video sharing sites to enjoy live concerts, even if the clips represent only a tiny percentage of the whole concert. So I decided to take clips from all the concerts that I attend and post them. I've now posted, in an year, about 20+ live concerts and early this week, the total clicks crossed 100K.

It also helped me in my work. Around the same time, I was also studying Web2.0 and it was all making sense suddenly as I had this small project running. I had too many clips and decided to organize the same thru a blog that I titled SuSwara. Once this blog was up, I tried driving traffic into the blog and its been a very interesting experience, as my work revolves around content discovery.

Youtube makes it easy to analyse through their insights tool.

• The daily clicks are anywhere between 250-450.
  
• More than 50% of the viewers are in the US and about 30% is in India.
• Young gen, teenagers are not too much into hindustani music. Age group of 25-34 is about 12%, 35-44 is about 22%, 44+ is about 54%.
• Males are 77% and females the rest
• Bulk (more than 90%) of the content discovery happens thu Youtube's "related videos". My blog is slowly picking traffic and has started accounting for about 5% of the traffic.
  

You can even notice Longtail phenomenon too, Out of the 22 concerts that I've presented the analysis above, about 4 concerts are runaway hits, but the clicks on the remaining 18 concerts are far more than the clicks for the top 4 concerts. Never thought it would be so much fun.

Artists too fall into Web2.0 or old world categories. There are some artists who happily grant permission to post them as they understand the power of internet. There are stubborn ones who openly announce not to record. Ofcourse I never asked the greats - Pt. Hariprasad Chaurasia and Pt. Shivkumar Sharma, they don't need such things.

But the most satisfying part is the mails that I receive almost daily thanking me for posting the clips and telling me how much they enjoyed. I now have e-friendships all over the world, thnx to youtube. The obsession to attend concerts has become so much that earlier when I had to skip a concert, I used to think I miss the concert, now I start thinking lot of other people outside on India are going to miss. So, I try to attend almost all concerts that come my way (though my wife is not happy) and what a blessing it is.

Bharat Ratna for Pt. Bhimsen Joshi

I'm thrilled to note that BharatRatna, the highest civilian award has be conferred on the giant of Hindustani Music, Pt. Bhimsen Joshi. Its a moment of great joy for millions of his fans like me. I started listening to his Daasavaanis (kannada bhajans, if you will), some 20-25yrs back and never knew that would be the starting point of my interest in Hindustani Music. I started buying Panditji's albums and now I've almost all of his albums and some mp3 files from live concerts.

Panditji is now about 86yrs old and even he was hospitalized, he came back and sung in the annual Sawai Gandhrwa Music festival that he has started in memory of his guru. Will pray god that Panditji lives for several more years.