Report: The Beatles’ popularity is plunging online

Beatles-related searches on Google and views of Beatles-related videos on YouTube are plunging, according to this report.

A quick look at Google Trends shows a fairly dramatic erosion in search traffic on both mainline search and YouTube, with drops reaching 70% in some cases.

I can't say the downward trends are that surprising. The Beatles broke up nearly 50 years ago and web traffic is focused on the "new" - current events, popular songs, fresh gossip and the latest scandals. Most of the time, there's not much reason to Google the Beatles. Anyone interested already knows who they are and what they did

The article doesn't mention whether searches for views spike when there's a "new" Beatles release, such as the Sgt. Pepper box or the "Eight Days a Week" film. I'd imagine that they must, at least slightly, as both of these releases performed very well in the marketplace. And those sales, along with the steady stream of new books and documentaries about the band, indicate to me that interest in the band may wax and wane, but that we'll be talking and thinking about the Beatles for a long time to come.



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