February 26, 2014

Caricatures in music space

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There’s a map going around Twitter, being described as the most popular band in each US state


It’s a bit surprising that every state has a different favourite band, so I looked at the site listed on the map as the source.  In fact, the listed bands are not the most popular ones in any of the states. They are something more interesting.

Paul Lamere used Spotify (and perhaps other social music-streaming services) to get music listening preferences for 200000 people. He then looked at which artist in the top 100 for a state had the worst ranking over the US as a whole. He forced the result to be different for every state by bumping the less-populous state to its next choice when there was a tie. So, as the title on the map actually says, these are the most distinctive bands for a state, not the most popular.  They are caricatures, not photographs.

Since he had data based on postal code (ZIP code), it’s a pity he grouped these all the way up to the state level.  It would have been interesting to see urban vs suburban vs rural differences, and the major geographical trends across states such as Texas.

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Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »