Sociomusicology: Unexpected Audience of 500000

9/30/25

Unexpected Audience of 500000

I recall back in 2007 while working as an Assistant Professor at Boston University, I visited beautiful Kyoto, Japan for some research, and at some point realized it could be worthwhile to develop an online portfolio to post various academic and artistic activities, including photos and videos. That is when I launched this blog Sociomusicology.

Now it is really hard to believe that on the final day of September 2025, the site has attracted a half-million page views. Compared to newspapers and magazines, 500000 is not a very large number, but it is encouraging to see what can come from persistence across years, even in what would seem to be a very niche acadeic subject area: music education, ethnomusicology, comparative education. I will post here an analysis of the traffic to this site, which could be interesting for anyone else who might also consider making a blog of their academic work.

One interesting point worth noting here is that the Singapore numbers look unbelievable, but across time I have realized this is due to the number of mainland Chinese who use a VPN that merely causes them to appear to be based in Singapore.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Welcome to Sociomusicology

For nearly 20 years (since 2007), this website has offered musings on contemporary society and its music by David G. Hebert, PhD. He is a sociomusicologist specializing in global music education who has held academic positions with universities on five continents. Dr. Hebert is now a tenured full Professor with Western Norway University of Applied Sciences, Bergen. There he leads the Grieg Academy Music Education (GAME) research group and manages the multinational government-funded Nordic Network for Music Education, which organizes annual intensive Master courses and exchange of teachers and students across eight countries. He is also an Affiliated Professor with both University of the Faroe Islands and Kyambogo University (Uganda), and an Honorary Professor in China with the Education University of Hong Kong.

Professor Hebert's research applies an international-comparative perspective to issues of pluralism, identity, and cultural relevance in music education, as well as processes by which new music traditions emerge and change - both sonically and socially - as they are adopted into institutions. Born in the 1970s, he is among the most widely-published and globally-active music scholars of his generation (h-index:21), with professional activities in an average of 8 countries per year across the past decade (2008-2020).