Trendspotting with Search: Billy Talent

Aug 25th 2006 View Comments




You ever heard of Billy Talent?
Me neither, I just found him in wordtracker’s short term top 1000.

Turns out he’s pretty well known in Canada, but never really broke in the US. You can see that in the bottom graph on a Google trends search of all regions. If you use another, international, keyword for scale you can compare the all reigons graph with the US only one.

Big difference.

The keyword list for Billy Talent is predictable for a new artist, very high traffic first keyword, lots of song title and mp3 searches. Not so many lyrics searches. People near to hear them before they want to read the lyrics.

So as sort of an experiment I’m predicting that in some time (not sure when, but soon I think), Billy Talent is going to “break” in the US in some way. Then comparing the graphs above will tell a different story.

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  • http://www.b5media.com Jeremy Wright

    lol, pretty sure Billy Talent is the group name, not the artist’s name ;-) Kind of an AAR, but cooler. And Canadian :-D

  • http://danzarrella.com Dan Zarrella

    you know, i’m pretty sure i would have assumed that, but reading the post, I notice that I did say “his”.

    weird.

    who’s AAR? (or am I just an out-of-touch looser?)

  • http://www.davepye.com Dave Pye

    I bought their first album a couple years ago on the strength of a single I can’t even remember the name of. I am a sucker for Canadian bands. Or maybe just a sucker. If Our Lady Peace can make a dent down here, these guys will too.