Wednesday, November 28, 2012

The Geography of Pop and Country Hits

Early this year the good folks at Very Small Array did these maps showing locations in song titles of hit songs. The maps enable us to compare the geography of pop music (mostly urban) to that of country (Wolverton Mountain represent!)

Here are the pop hits. I'm not sure what Wiz Khalifa (as listed above the map title) has to do with this - he doesn't seem like the #1 hit type. Sorry the blogger templates won't let me post larger, more readable images but you're just a click away from the original content.


Here is country music.

While country hits are less international in scope they do get points for Japan and (apparently) multiple mentions of Waterloo. "Turning Japanese" wasn't a #1 hit? They must repeat song titles for each week they appear as a #1 hit. Are there really that many other songs about Folsom Prison?  How many country songs about Saginaw are there?

2 comments:

tahir sumar said...
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Christine said...

Nice maps! I started working on a similar project a while back, but ended up having trouble getting quality data. This may inspire me to give it another shot, if for no other reason than to compare my results to theirs!