This study, published by The Atlantic Cities, reveals that Los Angeles is the most popular music scene in the US, by far! Previous studies were based on the US Census Bureau or other government sources, but with the huge development of social media, almost anyone can do a census, anyone who has a lot of time in his hands.
Richard Florida and his team at the Martin Prosperity Institute collected data on more than 3 million artists connected to social media, and then mapped the data. The map above speaks by itself, California, and in particular Los Angeles is a big center of attraction for bands: 175,083 musical acts for Los Angeles, against 115,767 for New York City, which arrives in second place. Chicago is third with 69,963, then there is again a California city, San Diego with 46, 267. Seattle has only 37,224, whereas Orange County, Los Angeles suburb, almost reaches the same number with its 35, 953. Curiously, legendary musical cities such as Nashville, Memphis, New Orleans, Austin or Detroit did not even make their top-20 list.
There are definitively two big poles of attractions (LA and NYC regions) but when the distribution of musical acts is compared to population, Los Angeles is once again at the top with 184 acts per 10,000 people, and New York is not even in the top-20 picture.
Should I continue? They also did a map with the most popular acts based on the number of fans and other data, and boom! Los Angeles crushes New York once again with 3,547.9 against 1,967.6 for NYC in music popularity index (in millions).
A criticism of the study was that the authors use MySpace 2007 data, a rather irrelevant site these days, but they used it only to locate bands not to estimate their popularity.
So why is that? Why is Los Angeles attracting so many bands? I wonder what they would have found if the data had been applied to only Silver Lake/Echo Park! I mean there are tons of bands here, every single night I could see one hundred of them (known and unknown). One thing I have noticed, I can’t tell how many times I have heard a band saying ‘we are from….., but we've just moved here!’,… how many garage bands I have seen here and there,… how many DIY spaces (like Pehrspace) are out there : Los Angeles attracts bands like a big sunny magnet. That’s the opportunity, the numerous clubs, the numerous music festivals that occur all year long, the possibility to get a Monday residency at the Echo or the Satellite, the chance to work with some famous musicians, the chance to work at Amoeba during the day and have a gig at night, and everybody seems to come here to record an album!
I guess there are too many bands in Los Angeles,… how many will really make it? Still, more than ever, California über alles!