Thursday, November 29, 2018

New York's Music Map


Online ticket reseller Vivid Seats has mapped out the most popular music genre and the most popular music act in each New York zipcode area. The Most Popular Music Genres in New York map colors zipcode areas to reveal each area's favorite type of music. If you mouseover an area on the map you can also see the area's favorite musical artist or group.

Vivid Seats hasn't provided any information about how they have determined the popularity of different music genres in each area. I assume the data is based on the number of tickets bought for each type of music genre through the Vivid Seats website.

Back in 2015 the Wall Street Journal used jukebox data to create a similar interactive map which showed the most popular songs in New York neighborhoods. The NYC Jukebox Heroes: Musical Map uses data from TouchTunes jukeboxes to show what were the most played songs in different New York boroughs.

If you click on a zip-code area on the WSJ interactive map you can view the top ten most played bands and the top ten played musical artists. Back in 2015 the residents of Manhattan’s East Village loved listening to Beyonce. According to Vivid Seats these days they prefer the more guitar based sounds of Radio Head. However Beyonce will be happy to hear that she is still very popular in parts of Queens and Randalls Island.

Latin music seems to have particularly loyal fans. On both maps the 11368 zipcode area in Queens reports that Romeo Santos is the most popular artist. The Racial Dot Map of America might help to explain why Latin music is so popular in certain areas of New York. I'd hate to be accused of making assumptions about the musical taste of New York neighborhoods based on racial stereotypes but the Racial Dot Map might also provide some insight into why rock is most popular in certain neighborhoods and rap/hip-hop in others.

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