What Cities Lead The Flow of Music

We all know in fashion that London and New York are considered the forerunners that everyone chases after. Two researchers, Conrad Lee and Pádraig Cunningham at the Clique Research Cluster in Ireland, introducing that data can show which cities play a similar role for music.

Last.fm broadcasts lists of plays by location, the studied Last.fm data for 200 cities worldwide starting back as 2003 – 60 billion pieces of data from it’s users.

They recently analyzed statistical techniques to pick which cities lead others. Pointed out on MIT’s Teclnology Review they formulated a system to access a link pointing from one city to another.

Check out this study, showing some cities appear in a more dominant position for certain genres of music. Montreal leads North America in indie music listening habits while Atlanta drives Hip Hop. That leaves Europe and Paris leading for indie music, but Oslo leads for music overall.

Another interesting tip is that the data seems to show that the size of the city doesn’t matter as much as we might think when it comes to new music being revealed.

Tell us what you think? Do smaller cities impact more of a music trend then larger cities?