Yahoo released its 2005 report on top searches this week, and while music sales may have kept falling during those 12 months, the popularity of music and music stars remained as popular as ever. Of the top overall web searches, a minimum of seven and a max of nine were musicians, depending on whether you credit Lindsay Lohan (maybe) or Paris Hilton (almost certainly not) as musicians.
In fact, music stars dominated almost every category that didn’t exclude it (such as sports searches), stealing at least seven of the top 10 spots for image searches, video searches and celebrity searches.
The search lists may have also revealed why music sales continue to drop, even as music stars remain belles of the web ball. For “electronics” searches, music-related technologies like XM and Sirius satellite radio made the top ten, but the top two spots for the year went to two ever-present thorns in the side of the music industry: “iPod” and “music downloads.”
