This is a fascinating idea, and it’s right in my wheelhouse — data + maps + music. This is a map of the world’s “music trigger cities” — places that produce a disproportionate number of globally successful musical acts. In their words:

…the consumption of music and social behavior is often more dynamic in high-population centers elsewhere with a younger populace. Non-Western metropolitan hubs are consistently on the lists of the top cities of breakout artists on Chartmetric. The trigger cities concept was developed to gain a better understanding of oft-overlooked music ecosystems through the power of data.

I don’t know anything about Chartmetric, the company that made this, but they seem legit. Here’s their methodology:

Our team developed a list of artists who met certain criteria as of July 1, 2024: their first release was sometime within the past four years, they ranked within the top 5,000 artists on Chartmetric, and their YouTube audience was not dominated by a specific country (ensuring that these artists were not just regional breakouts, but true global stars). We pulled each artist’s top 50 cities on Spotify by monthly listeners, and compiled the 30 that appeared most frequently to create our final list of trigger cities. These cities were then divided into four tiers, with the most commonly appearing (therefore most influential cities) appearing in tier one, and the next most common in tier two, and so on.

When you get to the big interactive map, you can click on the cities to see the genres that are most commonly associated with them. There’s also a ‘map/table’ toggle at the top right of the map that’ll show you the cities as a list.

It would be fascinating to plot these over time. While I imagine the tier 1 and 2 cities are pretty fixed, I imagine that the tier 3 and 4 cities would change pretty regularly. I don’t know anything about Kuala Lumpur, but there’s a time when Toronto would have been a strong contender (ie. Drake/The Weeknd/Shawn Mendes era.)

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