Interactive Map Shows America's Music Preferences by Genre

Earlier in 2014, a music technology firm called the Echo Nest shared a series of maps tracking American music tastes. One showed each state’s most popular music not popular elsewhere, another showed each state’s favorite artists, and another showed each state’s most ignored artists. Those maps showed an unusual level of interest, and in March the company announced it was being acquired by Spotify. Now comes an interactive map of U.S. tastes by genre. Online real estate broker Movoto came up with the map by developing scores based on data from the National Endowment of the Arts, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, plus state-level music preferences from Wikipedia.

Though you might think each region’s favorite music genre would be commonsense — Nashville loves country, and so on — the map does make for fun perusing. For instance, while rock was the leading choice in most regions, it had the tighest lock on Los Angeles, New York City, Minneapolis, and New Orleans. Big cities in Nevada, Florida, and Texas listed country as their favorite genre after rock. EDM is everywhere, and rap does well in Minneapolis and Seattle along with historically rap-centric cities like New York and Los Angeles. And so on.

Check out the interactive version of the “All-American Music Map” here, and see the individual maps below. (Red reflects the highest concentration of music popularity, and green the least.)

This Map Shows Each State’s Most Popular Music Not Popular Anywhere Else
The Actual Map of Each State’s Favorite Artists Is Kind of a Bummer
R. Kelly Dominates Map of States’ Most Ignored Artists