The Internet is changing
Since Bachtrack was launched in 2008, the site has been free to use and funded by advertising and sponsored content. We are doing our very best to keep it that way.
However, it won’t have escaped you that the Internet has changed a great deal in the last year. The most significant – and unwelcome – change has been in Google Search. In the past, you could type in a search query about classical music and expect to see a set of results that would take you to various websites, often including Bachtrack. Today, the top of your results page will most probably contain a considerable set of YouTube videos, probably augmented by an “AI Summary” of the search results. Google’s purpose is to keep you on their platform, seeing their advertising: they get no benefit from you clicking through to Bachtrack and seeing advertising in which they take no share of the revenue.
The social media platforms have been engaging in the same strategy of discouraging users from clicking away from their platform (unless that click is paid for) for several years now, as well as restricting the number of people who view a post unless it has been promoted.
Why we need your data
In the past, the majority of our traffic has come from Google. The traffic from social media has slowed to a trickle, and Google traffic looks like it’s going in the same direction: we’ve seen figures from around the web for decreases in search traffic of up to 50% since AI summaries first appeared, with the trend accelerating.
Bachtrack’s lifeblood is the revenue from our advertisers. If the trend continues, our usefulness to those advertisers will decline, our ad revenue will steadily disappear, and we will be unable to survive.
Therefore, we need to do two things:
- Firstly, to give people a means of finding bachtrack.com that does not use Google, Facebook or their ilk as intermediaries. That means we need your permission to email you on a regular basis – although not too often – to help you to make the best use of the site.
- Secondly, to gain far better information about where our site visitors come from and the patterns of content they access. This will enable us to make a better case to prospective advertisers as to why they should continue to use us.
How we will and won’t use your data
What we will not do, unless we ask you and receive your permission, is to sell your data or to identify you individually to any third party. The only reason we will ask for your name is so that we can greet you politely in our emails.
However, we will aggregate your data with that of other similar visitors to understand the patterns of what content on the site is viewed by people with different characteristics and how features are used, and we may share that aggregated information with advertisers and others. To give three examples of many, we might show which are the most popular articles read in a particular country, how users behave differently between desktop and mobile, or how many listings the average user looks at in a session.
We will use your email address to send you service reminders if you have not used the site for over a certain period.
In addition, if you select the appropriate options when registering, we will send you one or more of our newsletters. At the time of writing, the English language newsletter is weekly, while the French, German and Spanish language newsletters are monthly, but this might change.
Benefits of registration
We have designated some pages on the site as requiring registration: these are reviews, articles (unless sponsored), news items and individual listing pages. For these, we will permit a maximum of five accesses in any given 30-day period before requiring you to register. Other pages, such as home pages and search results, remain fully open. When you are signed in, access to these pages will be quicker.
Registration also gives you access to some useful extra features of the site:
- The What’s On page will show a list of your recent searches
- You will have access to a personal diary in which you can record your thoughts about performances you have seen and keep a wish list of performances you might go to in future
- You will be able to set alerts for favourite performers, works, venues, etc., to receive notifications about newly listed or modified events that feature your favourites.
So please, if you haven’t already, register today. It gives some nice benefits (the personal diary in particular is a winner, I promise you), and it will help us keep the site free to use.
Happy concert-going (not to mention opera- and dance-going), from David, Alison and the whole Bachtrack team.
