Hitwise posts their list of hottest bands on social networks and blogs and the social network list makes for interesting reading. Other than three artists in the list of twenty, I have no clue about who or what the others are.

Robin makes the point clear with this:

As you can see, with the exception of Coldplay - who shot to the top of the list thanks to their new album - most of top searches sending traffic to social networking sites are up and coming new bands / artists.

I will readily accept a single statistic alone cannot support an entire theory, but I do believe that we will increasingly see trends like this in the times to come.