Music Salon Analytics

I'm not afraid to acknowledge that this is not the most popular blog on the Internet. Just one of the best! Heh! I have over 1.7 million accumulated page views, but this year will be the 10th anniversary of the blog, so that is no big deal. Some of the more popular blogs get that many in a couple of days. And don't even mention Twitter (please!). I usually get between 15,000 and 20,000 page views a month, which I regard as really pretty good for a very specialized site.

But in the last few days I have seen a huge leap in traffic: yesterday over 4,000 page views and already today, over 2,000 and it's not even 9 am yet where I am. So I had a look at my Stats and here is what I found, over the last 30 days, this is how my traffic breaks down:

Usually my largest volume is from the US, the UK, Russia, Germany, then it varies, perhaps Canada and some other European nations. It is not surprising that so much traffic comes from non-English speaking countries as there is a little widget on the right hand side that will translate the blog into many languages. And countries like Russia and Germany are music superpowers so I talk a lot about music in and from those places. I even talk a lot about music from Sweden sometimes. But I can't quite see why nearly 50% of my traffic recently has been from there. Anyone have any ideas? Should I start looking for commissions from Swedish orchestras? (Yes, yes!)

In any case, in honor of my Swedish visitors here is Esa-Pekka Salonen with the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra in a performance of the Symphony No. 4 of Jean Sibelius (and one of my favorite filmed performances of a Sibelius symphony):