Crawley – Welcome to Music Town, UK

My home town of Crawley is apparently the undisputed heavyweight champion of British music.

At least, that is what you might conclude from the UK Music Cities Explorer. When the interactive map's results are normalized by population, Crawley appears as the largest circle on the map, giving it the highest Spotify-listener footprint per resident of any UK urban area in the explorer.

Not bad for a small town in the south of England.

The UK Music Cities Explorer is an interactive exploration of the geographical origins and global popularity of British bands. Using the map, you can search for individual bands or places, explore where artists were formed, compare Spotify monthly listeners and followers, and switch between raw totals and results normalized by the population of each urban area.

The population-normalized view is where things become particularly interesting. Simply counting Spotify listeners naturally gives the biggest cities a huge advantage. London has a lot more potential musicians than Crawley. But divide a city's musical reach by its population and suddenly smaller places can start punching far above their weight.

Which is how Crawley ends up looking like Britain's musical superpower.

Well ... sort of. Take away just one band - The Cure - and Crawley disappears from the list.

The fascinating thing about the UK Music Cities Explorer is that the answer to the question which British music city punches furthest above its weight? changes depending on exactly how you choose to ask the question - and, more importantly, which data you choose to use.

The developer's accompanying blog post, Which British Music City Punches Furthest Above Its Weight?, explores how dramatically the answer can change depending on how you define a city, which bands you include, how you measure popularity and whether you adjust for population.

The post provides a fascinating deep dive into a more carefully controlled ten-city comparison. In this analysis, each of the UK's ten largest urban areas is represented by the same number of selected bands. This time, the results conclude that Sheffield punches furthest above its weight, with the largest population-normalized Spotify reach of the ten cities studied.

Damn them Arctic Monkeys.