Find Out Your City’s Signature Songs

Spotify analyzed urban streaming patterns all over the world.

July 14, 2015

Streaming numbers from Spotify keep yielding new information about the ways the world consumes music. The service's latest study determined the tunes that make each city "distinctive," meaning "music that people in each city listen to quite a bit, which people in other cities also do not listen to very much." (Spotify did a similar thing for each U.S. state last year.) If you click on a city on the map below, you can listen to a playlist of those tunes that make that city different. In Louisville, KY, for example, these songs are mostly by Kentucky acts—Sundy Best, My Morning Jacket, Bryson Tiller—and Houndmouth, from nearby in Indiana. Santa Barbara is set apart by it's love of Chromeo, Odesza, and AlunaGeorge (among other things), while London is bumping grime and Jamie xx.

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At the bottom of the blog post, Spotify casually notes, "We update each of these distinctive city playlists twice per month. Each update involves analyzing approximately 20 billion listener/track relationships." Another recent analysis of Spotify data suggested that American rappers often struggle to earn comparable streaming success in overseas markets (at least in 2014).

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Find Out Your City’s Signature Songs