States may share similar accents and local foods, but now a map is giving each one a trending music artist.
Paul Lamere, director of the music intelligence company Echo Nest, said the different musicians included on the map published in February represented the distinctive taste of music for that particular state.
Lamere had looked over data from some of the music streaming sites underneath the control of the Echo Nest, such as Spotify.
He then used the collected information to create a map of the United States with different artists’ names squeezed within the borders of each one.
Country music star and judge of “The Voice,” Blake Shelton, took Indiana’s spot.
Devin Summan, a sophomore communications major, said he agreed with Shelton’s ranking because he is a country fan.
“Indiana’s very country dominant when it comes to music,” he said. “He fits in the genre pretty well.”
Rachael Brown, a senior sales major, said she didn’t even recognize Shelton’s name. She said her and her friends generally listened to hip-hop.
Music groups such as The Head and the Heart, Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros soon picked up on the article, sharing it on Facebook and thanking their fans.
Later in another blog post, Lamere said his first map had caused some confusion. His readers misinterpreted his most distinctive artist map as listing the most popular artist per state.
He had actually looked at the most listened to artists in each state and compared them to different regions. Artists listened to significantly more in one state than any other were the ones included on his first map.
Lamere then posted a new map with the artists streamed the most in each state over the last year according to the same data. His findings revealed Jay-Z to be the most streamed artist in Indiana. All of Indiana’s bordering states also showed the rapper as their most popular artist.
As an opposition to his maps, he created one that shows which artists get fewer listens in a region compared to how popular they are in the nation based on the top 50 artists in the last year. For Indiana, it is Haim, a band that also gets less love in Ohio, Florida, Mississippi and Arizona.
Melinda Messineo, a sociology associate professor, said an artist’s approval rate stems from word of mouth as well as the strength of the live music culture and the radio play of different artists in each area.
“Familiarity is linked to affinity,” she said
She acknowledged the affect of region on popularity, but said with the Internet, the connection between where someone lives and which artists they prefer has lessened.
Keaton Leach, a Catholic missionary at Ball State, moved from Illinois. Since his move, he has yet to notice a difference in listening preferences between the states.
Instead, Leach mostly notices differences in an artist level of fame in different areas as a result of age rather than whether a person lives on the East Coast or not.
Messineo agrees youth does factor into the maps, only because she doesn’t see older people using Spotify.
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