I like to think I listen to music from a range of artists around the world, so I thought I’d test the theory. I used my recently played list on iTunes to see how true this is. I started with a month of music but it was way too large so I limited the list to the last two weeks. It included 59 songs. I listened to two full albums, so the number of artist on the map is way less than. If I listened to multiple songs from the same artist I put my the one I like most that was on the recently played list.
Picking criteria was a bit difficult. Questions I had to consider included deciding whether to use where someone is working now or where a person was born? How am I showing difference between music genres? Can I get sound in here somehow?
In the end I decided to go with the birthplace/hometown. My data comes from wikipedia. For some artists I couldn’t find a city. This happen for a couple African artists and newer American artists. For those I dropped the pin in the state they are from. My little exercise yielded a few surprises. For example, Yaeji is a musician that makes electronic music that uses a mix of Korean and English. I thought she was making music in Korea but it turns out she is based in Brooklyn. I did this project using a larger dataset to start (then got super tired and narrowed my list) and some of my favorite Afrobeat and Soca artists were actually from the U.S. and England. This trend got me thinking about heritage, culture, and what things (food, music, ideologies) we adopt from our parents. I wanted the map to be somewhat interactive, so I added the links to the songs in case anyone wants to take a listen. The pushpins have youtube links to the songs.
Overall I think my experiment went pretty well. The only continent I missed was South America. I invite people to take a look and a listen sometime.
Legend: Purple pushpins: R&b, Blue pushpins: Mellow/sleepy time, Green pushpins: Hip hop, White pushpin: Afrobeats, Light Blue pushpin: Electronic, Red pushpin: Rock, Pink pushpin: Pop; Yellow stick: Songs I thought people should check out by upcoming artists
