Check Your State's Music Preferences With This Interactive Map
punk preferences
This is strange to find this posted on the real estate blog Movoto, but this interactive map is really interesting. It lets you move your cursor on different musical genres, rock & oldies, blues, country, EDM, rap, metal, indie….and it brings a scale of colors (from green to red) on the map on the right, indicating the degree of the genre likeness in the different states.
To build it, they used data from the National Endowment of the Arts, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (via the Martin Prosperity Institute) and some maps are not very surprising. Blues, gospel and soul are obviously the genres of choice in the southern states, but look at California, the state where everything is happening! Just click on punk, and the whole golden state become red, Oregon (yeah Portland), Washington state and Tennessee also get a good mention. Tennessee? I thought they were all about country over there,… which is also true. California (and to a lesser extend Nevada, Oregon) is also the king state of Indie music, whereas alternative has a big fat red spot at the corner of California/Nevada/Arizona. Rock, Rap and EDM equally split between the east coast (essentially New York) and the west coast (essentially California), whereas metal is essentially a Washington state thing. And what about pop? It is very Californian once again, and even very LA!
Now, if you analyze the data at the city level, overall rock was still a top choice for people in many regions, with a predominance for Los Angeles, New York City, Minneapolis and New Orleans. Country was loved everywhere outside of Nashville as Dallas, Austin, Tampa, Orlando, and Las Vegas listed country music as one of their favorite genres. EDM is more about San Francisco than LA (and I happily let them have it) but taste for electronics culminates in New York on the East Coast, but also in Miami, Chicago and Milwaukee. Rap is very present in NYC, LA, Miami, Minneapolis and Seattle, whereas punk is a west coast thing but Nashville, Orlando and Rochester also like it. Anyway, there are tons of information on this page regarding states and cities’ preferences for music genres, and even a detailed analysis per each major city. One thing is sure, we love diverse music in California as there is not a genre that doesn’t make the state blush in some shade of yellow to red! And I feel sorry for all these states in the middle which always stay in the green, don’t these people like anything? If you believe these maps it seems that most people passionate about music live on the coastal areas.
According to the Movoto blog, music choices ‘aren’t just about music, they are about fashion, philosophy, lifestyle, too’… after all this is a real estate blog and they may want to use these data for other purposes, may be to sell more houses depending on people’s preferences for music? Like… let’s transform the decoration of this house into something more rock & roll, metal, folk, punk,… because this is what people in this state like? I am not sure how you do that but all this work has to find some good use at one point.
