In 1997 I moved from Detroit to Colorado’s Front Range. The Front Range isn’t rural by any means — constituting Denver, Fort Collins, Boulder, Colorado Springs, and a great many lesser places — basically making up a big vertical smear of mile-high suburbs running from Wyoming almost to Colorado’s southern border with New Mexico, with mountains providing a border to the west and the Great Plains on the east.This is going to sound really stupid, but I remember noticing immediately a certain something about the Front Range. I liked music a whole lot and, in particular, cool music like any other asshole in tenth grade, and I wasn’t so much stunned but fascinated by how incredibly lame the music was there. It was an alternative rock backwater a year or maybe even more behind Detroit (as repped by record store displays, the local modern rock radio stations, what kids talked about; no one was ever into that band’s first album). This is probably the point where I discovered actual good “underground” music, just by force of having to hunt, but that’s another story. Now, in 2012, it seems a safe assumption that regional spreading of trends is a dead mechanic (the internet, right, instant access to all markets); but a new study using very, very deeply dredged Last.fm data, suggests otherwise.Music trends do in fact build up in certain locations that are less obvious than you’d think, before precipitating elsewhere, the study, written by a pair of brains at Ireland’s Clique Research Cluster, claims. Ether-based influencers like Pitchfork and NPR are not all-powerful. Geographically, the big winner for “indie” music in North American is Montreal. Los Angeles is up there too, with New York kind of in the middle (ha ha). Poor Denver is still hanging out at the very bottom, though so is Seattle. Meanwhile, in the “all music” catagory, Atlanta sits at the top with Chicago and, uh, Pittsburgh hanging out not too much farther down. Finally, hip-hop’s spread looks a bit like an amalgam of “all music” and “indie music.”The researchers took 60 billion pieces of data, collected from 200 cities worldwide beginning in 2003. The concept is simple-ish, a matter of looking at Last.fm’s popular charts seperated regionally. Seems like a natural way to monitor the spread of trends. To find cities that “follow” other cities, they look at where Last.fm links in one city point geographically. As Technology Review notes, this is a very problematic data set; there’s a lot of noise, or results that obscure larger predictions/skew them. An example would be regions with very little Last.fm penetration. (Popular on Last.fm is not the same for every city, of course.) Also, apparently Last.fm’s scrobbling service was acting wonky for several weeks of the study, so there’s that.In any case, the authors are testing three hypothesis with the data (coupled with a recently developed noise-clearing algorithm):The first is that although many of the most popular artists are listened to around the world, music preferences are closely related to nationality, language, and geographic location. We find support for this hypothesis, with a couple of minor, yet interesting, exceptions. Our second hypothesis is that some cities are consistently early adopters of new music (and early to snub stale music). To test this hypothesis, we adapt a method previously used to detect the leadership networks present in flocks of birds. We find empirical support for the claim that a similar leadership network exists among cities, and this finding is the main contribution of the paper. Finally, we test the hypothesis that large cities tend to be ahead of smaller cities–we find only weak support for this hypothesis.Yeah, I guess I’d say that some cities are just more new music-centric; it’s more discussed, considered, and sought-after. New music is more valued in Portland than in, say, Oklahoma City. That makes sense to me, though if there’s a music snobbier place than New York, it doesn’t exist in America, if even on planet Earth. I think relative Last.fm use could have something to do with that weirdness. What’s the primary usage group of Last.fm? Do early-adopters of musical trends not mix well with the site? It’d be interesting to see if anything like this data could be replicated using another data source, not that I have any idea for a comparable data source. Spotify?A second note: will we be able to predict the movements of popular music from these results in the future? For this to be “right,” it had better mean something for data not yet existing. Finally, it’d be interesting to see these results mapped against popular indie band touring destinations. Is touring life 2012 actually working out for someone?Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.
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