Music Fandom Maps | Hacker News Reader

Music Fandom Maps

nytimes.com

116 pointspmcpinto51 comments

As with any map like this, the most startling thing to me is how the south really is a totally different culture, almost a totally different country.

It's a race thing - most of the country's African American population lives in the south, with little pockets scattered elsewhere. NYT did a similar set of maps for TV shows and the results were similar. White America likes hip-hop, as you can see from the maps but there's almost no interest in other pop music from the south.

Here's an interesting filter to apply to this map: all of the innovative music from the last 100 years originated in the triangle between Memphis, New Orleans and Nashville—blues, jazz, R&B, rock and roll, and country. All of those genres were born in that small geographical area. It's the Silicon valley of modern music. You could also argue that hip hop is a permutation of blues/r&b.

What's also interesting is that now that triangle is "the established players" and the disruption comes from various other areas. Grunge from Seattle, Motown/R&B from Detroit, hip-hop from Atlanta, old-time from Asheville, electric blues from Chicago.

Much like how Apple from Silicon Valley owned the idea of buying digital music until Spotify swooped in from Sweden and disrupted that business model and forced Apple to change their plans, the Nashville sound is in constant danger of being disrupted from afar by similar-but-more-modern sounds.

Interesting parallel I think.

Since I run https://www.music-map.com this naturally caught my eye.

Unfortunately, there is no word on the methodology except that they did it with "the help of YouTube’s geocoded streaming data". Does anybody know what that is?

Why is it that on some maps the artist is very far away from another, but when you click on that artist the original one appears much closer?

Is the scale relative? Is there any indicator how scaled up or down the relationships are?

It's a simulated annealing process that happens live in front of you.

Each artist has a desired distance to each other artist and is trying to get to a position that satisfies all these desired distances as good as possible.

How does your music map work? Not too clear on how related artists are picked.

Also, I'm guessing that the nyt got some sort of special dataset from YouTube. Geo located streams are priveleged to the content owner, per the YouTube API.

It is all user driven. The map is based on what people enter at http://www.gnoosic.com.

I expect that the data is the same as what is found on the YouTube Artists site, which has music data for different geographic regions.

Go to https://artists.youtube.com/insights/location and click on "How is this calculated?".

This is an aside but I'm wondering if you have any recommendations for finding new music one may enjoy?

Frustrated with music recommendation services I built a ruby script this past weekend to scrape my favorite artist's last.fm pages and then iterate on each follower, compiling a list of their likes to sort of crowd-source music recommendations for myself.

This too resulted in failure, it seems that the problem is me, I'm far too picky.

I'd love to get your insight on any alternative strategies for finding new artists if your likes don't necessarily fit squarely inside genres.

Is this from some public YouTube data/API? Would really like to do this for other countries.

VideoAmigo already does this for all countries (sourcing from YouTube) Top videos: https://www.videoamigo.com/music-charts/top-music-videos Top Channels: https://www.videoamigo.com/music-charts/top-music-channels Top Unsigned artists: https://www.videoamigo.com/music-charts/top-music-unsigned

You can sort each by country, genre, language.

the country, genre, language is the reported country of the artist or channel. Not of the streams.

I would like to do the same with my country (malaysia). Even video amigo doesn't have the stats for mine. How would one do this? That's the interesting bit.

yours as in ... you as an artist? these are the top channels in Malaysia: https://www.videoamigo.com/music-charts/top-music-channels?c...

No,i am not an artist. Just for fun, to have an idea, how does; in this situation (music, be it unsigned artist or artist) youtube views coincide with the local mainstream (radio) plays.

It doesn't seem like it. I just did a quick look through the YouTube data/API and it seems like even with Vevo's auth (it looks like these are all artists with videos on Vevo and you need the content/channel owner's authorization to get reports on channels/videos) the viewer location data is only available at a country or state/province level through the API.

Some similar data for many different countries is displayed on the YouTube Artists site, though there doesn't appear to be an API.

https://artists.youtube.com/insights/location

The integrated youtube videos are really nice in this page. I like this best as an introduction to music I haven't heard. I like Kevin Gates 2 Phones.

Kevin Gates is an amazing, underrated artist and absolutely worth your time.

Fascinating. But so many of the maps look identical to each other, they obviously "cluster" together.

I'd be much more interested in seeing a SVD-style analysis that showed a map for each dimension and listed the bands that most closely matched the dimension.

It would literally discover "geographical music genres".

are these maps using county boundaries? i would prefer something like kernel density or normalizing for county population or something... but still very cool. mississippi louisiana alabama georgia seem to be one pole, and everywhere else the other.

Likely correlating with race:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_African...

Even more specific, you can see the Black Belt very clearly in a lot of the maps. Some artists correlate very positively, some very negatively.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Belt_(U.S._region)

Edit- No, it's actually not counties. There are more divisions on the map in Northern Arizona than there are counties there. Not sure what the divisions are. Zip code maybe?

Okay, took me a minute to understand it. So this is only based on Youtube views? I am more interested in radio, let alone if we could ever map iTunes sales to regions by song that would be impressive too. Another good area to explore is what are various college radio stations playing across the country?

With regards to youtube, some genres of music have been more aggressive using the medium than others and even some older artists have barely accepted the digital age fully or took a long time to do so.

Would radio be a good indicator of what people are actually listening to, though? All that would tell you is what the station is playing, not how many people are listening. Plus, stations have their own motives to play (or not play) what they do.

From what I've seen if people don't have access to their "own" media (be it a Spotify subscription, iTunes, loose MP3, CDs, whatever) and they want to listen to a song, YouTube is where they go.

I found it weird looking at my region and not a single map had any significant shading to it. I wonder if our tastes are just that esoteric or my neighbors prefer a genre of music that isn't represented in this article.

Also some of their analysis doesn't quite line up with the graphic... "of course, Eminem is popular in his hometown, Detroit" while Detroit is as darkly shaded on the map as, say, northern New Mexico.

It would be cool to see the inverse of this -- a service that analyzes your Spotify history and guesses where you are from.

What is the random zip code in eastern Washington that really likes to bump Future?

I'd rather see how the top touring bands are distributed.

Montanans really love their Eminem

Fun thing to think about - someone on twitter brought up that the Eminem map looks a lot like the Obama to Trump swing map. From what Maine, Michigan and Pennsylvania look like I think it's a decent match.

Roughnecks love them some Eminem.

Wow. Other than Metallica, I don't own an album by any of these people, and other than Metallica and Michael Jackson, I don't think I'd be able to name a single song by the few others that I do recognize the name.

Oh, and I'm using the word "album". That probably explains it all ... :-)

Their analysis is biased. Young people predominantly use digital services to consume music, whereas older generations still use CDs and the radio.

As an anecdote, the older I get, the less music I listen to. It used to be a big part of my identity, but now I just listen to music if it sounds good or if I need something to drown out the noise around me.

Anecdote applies to me.

I experience some headphone fatigue nowadays too. Once upon a time I must have been listening to music for 60-75% of my waking minutes.

Also somehow I feel much more tranquil in just walking and listening to my thoughts and feelings (even unwelcome ones). I think I listened to a lot of music to experiment with different identities and ways of feeling, and approx. since I turned 30 I started to develop my own in a much more interesting way.

>Their analysis is biased. Young people predominantly use digital services to consume music, whereas older generations still use CDs and the radio.

If you mean people in their 70s yes.

Because even 50 and 60 year olds use YouTube A LOT, and I'm speaking in all around the world, including much less developed areas.

You're using the word album, you're referring to "owning" music, and appears you're unfamiliar with any new music from the last 20 years. Time to switch to spotify.

I'm in almost the same boat. (I can name some Linkin Park songs, but I'm not thrilled about it.) I have of course listened to plenty of new music in the past 20 years, but at this point I rarely pay attention to anything other than new releases from bands I already enjoy (and limited attention at that). Today I primarily listen to Pandora, which I naturally have tuned to my own tastes.

While it's surely attributable to me getting older, my experience remains valid, and in my experience the overwhelming majority of new music is shit. I'm not completely unaware of Bruno Mars' existence and poised to be blown away when I sit down and listen to his stuff, because I've heard it, and it's terrible. The same goes for quite a few (but by no means all) of the acts mentioned in the article.

What bands do you enjoy?

Ehh if you look back a lot of the music from any decade is crap. It's just easier to forget.

>Ehh if you look back a lot of the music from any decade is crap.

Not necessarily true. Some decades stand out while others do not. Like the 60s for example vs the 90s. People in the 70s and 80s still cherished 60s icons, but few in the 00s and 10s care for 90s music (there's more interest in 80s music).

Hmm, interesting—from my perspective, i have similarly strong intuition for love of decades, but mapped differently. For instance i know virtually nobody into 80s music, but 90s r&b and hip-hop are reliable favorites.

My point being: give me a good band, and i can list three at the same time that people don't bring up anymore because they suck. I firmly believe this is nostalgic bias at work, although i dislike taylor swift and justin beiber as much as the next person. Or likely much more. I don't believe it means anything about the decade, just what labels decided people want to hear.

Or to put it another way, my beloved music from the past wasn't even "mainstream popular" then.

>For instance i know virtually nobody into 80s music, but 90s r&b and hip-hop are reliable favorites.

If you've grown in the 90s then that is probably skewed (from nostalgia etc), but I'm not talking about that (observations between personal friends etc of the same generation).

I'm talking about later generations insisting/obsessing on some previous decades (that they weren't even alive or old enough to experience). So statistically speaking (based on releases that "recreate" that sound, shows, movies and books about the era, re-releases, fashion, etc).

> I have of course listened to plenty of new music in the past 20 years, but at this point I rarely pay attention to anything other than new releases from bands I already enjoy

What??? There is tons of interesting rock music coming out these days. 2017 has been a great (I would say possibly the best since maybe 2009) year for everything from indie pop to metal...

> You're using the word album, you're referring to "owning" music, and appears you're unfamiliar with any new music from the last 20 years.

"Album" is just a collection, and applies whether or not you own it. The word is used all over Spotify, iTunes, and other online music services as an organizational unit.

Fun fact: "Record album" used to mean a literal album — a bound collection of sleeves containing records. This was necessary since 12-inch 78s only held about 4-5 minutes of audio per side.

>"Album" is just a collection, and applies whether or not you own it. The word is used all over Spotify, iTunes, and other online music services as an organizational unit.

Yes, but it's not that relevant today. They still exist, but youngsters mostly care for the hits.

I mean most of these are names you would have heard had you made any effort to follow music in the last decade. You don't have to love modern music but what is the value in commenting that you don't know it?

I mean yeah their entire discography is pretty religious. Makes sense. I do enjoy it while being non-religious myself however.

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