Demographics, Analytics, and Trends: The Shifting Sands of an Online Engagement with Music Theory

[1] Many greetings to you all, gentle readers of MTO! This year we celebrate the full fruition of an idea that nobody could have imagined just 22 years ago. The storied cast of characters collected in this special collection has described MTO's humble beginnings as well as its innovative use of technology and design. By the time I joined up as editor with Tim Koozin in 2008, MTO was already at the cutting edge. All Brent Yorgason, Sean Atkinson, and I had to do was spruce up the look and update a few features. Instead, I concentrated my time as editor on growing our pool of authors and establishing a broader readership, which was made significantly easier by the addition of Google Analytics in 2006. The ability to track readership in real time and to reach an ever increasing diverse group of authors at the drop of a hat allowed (and continues to allow) MTO to stay ahead of the curve, not just technologically, but also in its reaction to scholarly trends. In particular, an expansion of MTO's tradition of special volumes devoted to particular topics gave us an opportunity to reach out to new authors. Even better, these special volumes captured a rapidly growing readership. Indeed, six of our eight most read volumes over the past two decades are special volumes, and nine of the twenty-five most read volumes are special volumes, accounting for more than 50% of the readership for this group.(1) My task in the present special collection is to relate MTO's history to our discipline, employing data from web analytics as well as from submission and publication reports in order to explore trends in topics and demographics across the journal's 20 years of publications. Ultimately, this will provide a unique record of the Society for Music Theory's most public voice while pointing to developing trends. So, let's start with a simple question.I. Who Reads MTO?Figure 1. Number of returning visits to MTOFigure 2. Actual Google Analytics data from November 2006 to November 2013, including browser informationFigure 3. Google Analytics data showing repeat visits disaggregated by country (November 2006 to November 2013)Figure 4. Number of repeat visitors from countries in Western Europe (Google Analytics)[2] The answer is that many, many people read MTO. Using Google Analytics to track readership since 2006 (the first year that we implemented this tool), and conservatively estimating based on linear growth starting in 2003, MTO has had 1,504,811 unique visitors and approximately 418,897 return visitors. In the last seven years alone there have been over 46,000 visits to MTO lasting more than ten minutes, with many of them lasting significantly longer.[3] Figure 1 shows the tremendous growth of returning readership to MTO. The conservative estimate of linear growth is shown by the straight line to November 2006. The wiggly graph that follows is actual data from Google Analytics.[4] Figure 2 shows just the seven years of Google Analytic data, counting repeat visits, rather than unique visits.(2) The peaks in the blue repeat-visitor line generally coincide with the regular release of new volumes, which always bring a burst of interest in the journal. The very steep peak on September 16, 2013, for instance, coincides exactly with the announcement of MTO volume 19.3. Note, too, that the MTO audience has become increasingly Macintosh oriented, and, between January 2011 and October 2013, there have been over 9,000 return visitors using mobile devices, most of them on a gadget made by Apple.(3) Mobile users still represent only about 17% of MTO's readership. This number is continuing to grow, however.[5] Figure 3 includes a graphic from Google Analytics that shows repeat visits disaggregated by country. Not surprisingly, the vast majority of our readers hail from the U.S. and Canada. However, we also have a number of readers from overseas. The English-speaking world is well represented, with the U. …