It’s a Saturday, nobody’s reading, what better time for some serious navel-gazing?
The Freaky Trigger Readership Survey: Results
First of all thankyou to anyone who voted in this. The results, admittedly on a self-selecting sample, were hugely gratifying and more importantly the specific feedback was interesting and useful. Am I going to take any of the suggestions on board? Almost certainly yes. Am I going to stop writing about Eminem (who dominated the write-in votes on artist you’d like to see less of)? No.
Here are a few results nuggets:
NYLPM was quite easily the most popular feature. Unsurprisingly, the music-themed stuff is more popular than the non music-themed stuff, with FT’s typical rambling music discussion thinkpieces doing satisfyingly well. I Hate Music was the most divisive FT feature, finishing low on the list but gaining more ‘Excellent’ marks than anything else bar this page. IHM is also the most read part of Freaky Trigger. The least-liked part of the site is the letters page, which I’m considering turning into a forum, a la Nanette’s. (Feedback on this or anything else mentioned here welcomed).
What do Freaky Trigger readers think is important in a music zine? Top of the list is writing quality by a fair distance, with frequency of updates, originality, and choice of subject following. The least important qualities are apparently usefulness and taste compatibility, which gives me a certain sense of relief. In terms of our performance, we tend to do well on the stuff you’ve said was important: to nobody’s surprise, we do slightly less well on design issues.
What do people want more of? A host of indie bands cropped up here: I’ll try to find out who some of them are. In general you seem to want less disposable pop. Well, some you win and some you lose.
One of the most interesting questions was which other zines FT readers look at and like. I’m not going to give the full rundown, though by all means e-mail me if you’re really that interested in who came bottom. But the five sites which did best were:
1. Tangents
2. Skykicking
3. Motion
4. Josh Blog
5. Steal This Blog
The most read sites included Josh’s and Fred’s, and those two eternal opposites Pitchfork and Indieshite.