To heroically understate the situation, I am not personally a fan of Christmas music.  

But it's my job to help you enjoy the music you enjoy, not the music I enjoy. If you are one of the many, many people who enjoy Christmas music, this is your time of year, and to help you enjoy your time of year in the specific manner you enjoy most, the genre system I work on at Spotify actually has several subvariations of Christmas music:  

Every Noise at Once - xmas genres  

But according to our data, this is still just the surface of the seasonal alternate-reality. With a sufficiently jolly bias for inclusion and a merry tolerance of error we can find at least one maybe-genre-related maybe-xmas song for more than 1200 of our 1300+ genres. And, in fact, we can not only attempt to make xmas playlists for all genres, but we can then even rank the genres by how xmas-related they are, which is interesting information for both people who want to find xmas music and people who want to avoid it.  

Every Noise at Once - all genres sorted by xmasness  

But this sorting and filtering is all stuff I do normally, for my own purposes. If there is to be a non-denominational Xmas cleanly separable from the religious Christmas, it should probably revolve around the spirits of generosity and giving, which call for gestures that you don't merely do for yourself.  

And so, in what I hope is this spirit, I have also made you this gift:  

 

This is an algorithmically-generated xmas-specific manipulation of my genre map. It is the ultimate ornament, I think, a symbol-mosaic composited out of unsilent nights. I didn't draw the tree, I manipulated math so that the tree would self-organize that way. (Drawing it would have been faster.) Math doesn't believe or disbelieve, but it can multiply anybody's joy.

I make a very sidebarred appearance in the November 2014 Harper's Magazine Readings section (page 21), where they list some of the genres that amused them in my genre map. The choices seem a little random to me (why is "Yugoslav rock" funny?), and I can't explain why they felt "Viking" had to be capitalized, but it's cool to appear in a magazine I actually used to read.

I had limited expectations for applying the logic from The Sounds of Places, which is based on whole countries, to individual cities. Cities are smaller than countries, and data-wise, smaller usually means more random.  

And maybe there is more randomness, overall, but there's enough non-randomness to be intriguing. Or, to put this another way, any chance that I wouldn't publish this evaporated when The Sound of Dundee turned out to, in fact, include the immortal "The Unicorn Invasion of Dundee" by Gloryhammer.  

The Sounds of US Cities
The Sounds of European Cities

At work I've been looking at the distinctive collective music listening of individual US cities. A lot of this, as you might imagine, turns out to be local music from in or near each city, or pop music with some sort of regional connection.  

But statistically, the most popular "national" hits tend to get mixed in with the local stuff at some point, through sheer ubiquity. Taylor Swift's "Shake It Off" is the most obvious example of this at the moment, a song so popular that it's basically representative of the distinctive listening of humans, or at least of American humans who use Spotify.  

For amusement, though, here is a ranking of major US Cities by where on their most-distinctive current song chart "Shake It Off" ranks as of today. The cities at the top are the ones who have surrendered most unreservedly to "Shake It Off", either through genuine disproportionate enthusiasm, and/or because they just don't have anything better of their own to play. The ones at the bottom have maintained the strongest resistance to this invasion. The >100s at the very bottom show the cities where immunity is so strong that "Shake It Off" doesn't even make the top 100 most-distinctive songs.  

#	City
1	Arlington VA
1	Chandler
1	Gilbert
1	Mesa
2	Akron
2	Albany
2	Anchorage
2	Cleveland
2	New Haven
2	Pasadena
2	Tucson
2	Worcester
3	Alexandria
3	Des Moines
3	Orange
3	Scottsdale
3	Vancouver
3	Wilmington DE
4	Hoboken
4	Plano
4	Pompano Beach
5	Gainesville
5	Hartford
5	Somerville
5	Syracuse
5	Tacoma
5	Wichita
6	Bellevue
6	Providence
6	Reno
6	State College
7	Colorado Springs
7	Santa Clara
8	Aurora
8	Little Rock
9	Littleton
9	Tempe
10	East Lansing
10	Tampa
10	Trenton
10	Virginia Beach
11	Irvine
11	Sunnyvale
12	Albuquerque
12	Chicago
13	Boise
13	Boston
13	Cambridge
13	Las Vegas
13	Philadelphia
13	Silver Spring
13	Spokane
14	Dayton
14	Jacksonville
14	Miami Beach
14	Overland Park
15	Durham
15	Eugene
15	Lexington
15	St. Louis
16	Raleigh
16	Washington DC
17	Boca Raton
17	Springfield MO
18	Greensboro
18	Greenville
18	Spring
19	Cincinnati
19	Hyattsville
19	Murfreesboro
20	Fremont
20	Fresno
20	Ithaca
20	Tallahassee
21	Bloomington
21	Indianapolis
21	Pittsburgh
23	Corona
23	Phoenix
24	Frisco
25	Columbia MO
26	Ann Arbor
26	Denton
26	San Luis Obispo
26	West Palm Beach
27	Grand Rapids
27	Madison
27	Norman
28	Norfolk
29	Jersey City
29	Orlando
29	San Jose
30	Lawrence
30	Louisville
31	Bakersfield
31	Omaha
32	New York
32	Richmond
33	Salt Lake City
34	Columbus
34	Lewisville
34	Oklahoma City
35	Milwaukee
36	Wilmington NC
37	Columbia SC
37	Santa Barbara
38	San Diego
39	Charleston
40	Lincoln
40	Toledo
41	Long Beach
41	Riverside
41	St. Paul
42	Urbana
43	Berkeley
44	Katy
44	Minneapolis
45	Buffalo
46	Stockton
47	El Paso
49	Fort Collins
54	Charlotte
55	Chapel Hill
55	Kansas City
55	Knoxville
55	Tulsa
56	New Orleans
57	Denver
58	Farmington
60	Concord
60	San Antonio
64	Baton Rouge
67	Birmingham
68	Hayward
73	Mountain View
81	Whittier
83	Seattle
85	Humble
86	Atlanta
86	Santa Monica
87	Grand Prairie
92	Memphis
>100	APO
>100	Anaheim
>100	Arlington TX
>100	Athens
>100	Austin
>100	Baltimore
>100	Boulder
>100	The Bronx
>100	Brooklyn
>100	College Station
>100	Dallas
>100	Detroit
>100	Fort Lauderdale
>100	Fort Worth
>100	Hialeah
>100	Hollywood FL
>100	Honolulu
>100	Houston
>100	Irving
>100	Los Angeles
>100	Lubbock
>100	Mesquite
>100	Miami
>100	Nashville
>100	Newark
>100	Oakland
>100	Portland OR
>100	Provo
>100	Rochester
>100	Sacramento
>100	San Francisco
>100	Santa Ana

 

Presumably none of this will bother Taylor, but "people who are not going to listen disproportionately are going to not listen disproportionately" wouldn't fit the meter of the song very well, so I assume that's why she didn't mention it.

For another way to look at the data from my examination of the distinctive music-listening of US cities, I ranked the top 10 cities by distinctive affiliation to some major genres.  
 

acoustic pop  

1	Spokane
2	Knoxville
3	Grand Rapids
4	St. Paul
5	Norman
6	Birmingham
7	Nashville
8	Austin
9	Madison
10	Athens

 

alternative country  

1	Nashville
2	Louisville
3	Raleigh
4	Frisco
5	Charleston
6	Fort Worth
7	Birmingham
8	College Station
9	Grand Prairie
10	Greenville

 

alternative dance  

1	San Francisco
2	Santa Monica
3	Tucson
4	New York
5	Tempe
6	Pasadena
7	San Diego
8	Gainesville
9	Chicago
10	San Luis Obispo

 

bachata  

1	Newark
2	The Bronx
3	Jersey City
4	Miami
5	Hollywood FL
6	Brooklyn
7	Fort Lauderdale
8	Hialeah
9	West Palm Beach
10	Tampa

 

banda  

1	Mountain View
2	Mesquite
3	Irving
4	Newark
5	Concord
6	Oakland
7	Santa Ana
8	Anaheim
9	Bakersfield
10	Los Angeles

 

ccm  

1	Springfield MO
2	Grand Rapids
3	Oklahoma City
4	Spokane
5	Birmingham
6	Tulsa
7	St. Paul
8	Colorado Springs
9	Knoxville
10	Norman

 

chillwave  

1	San Francisco
2	Santa Monica
3	Portland OR
4	Seattle
5	Brooklyn
6	New York
7	Pasadena
8	New Orleans
9	Berkeley
10	San Diego

 

contemporary country  

1	Des Moines
2	Lincoln
3	Omaha
4	Indianapolis
5	Columbia MO
6	Akron
7	APO
8	Dayton
9	Lexington
10	Albuquerque

 

country  

1	APO
2	Indianapolis
3	Akron
4	Albuquerque
5	Des Moines
6	Omaha
7	Columbia MO
8	Lincoln
9	San Antonio
10	Dayton

 

crunk  

1	Humble
2	Katy
3	Houston
4	Charlotte
5	Orlando
6	Baton Rouge
7	Farmington
8	Memphis
9	Irving
10	Tampa

 

dance pop  

1	Baltimore
2	Greensboro
3	Detroit
4	Las Vegas
5	Philadelphia
6	Gilbert
7	Pompano Beach
8	Trenton
9	Wilmington DE
10	Atlanta

 

dirty south rap  

1	Humble
2	Katy
3	Houston
4	Charlotte
5	Atlanta
6	Irving
7	Orlando
8	Farmington
9	Memphis
10	Arlington TX

 

duranguense  

1	Mesquite
2	Irving
3	Mountain View
4	Arlington TX
5	Dallas
6	Newark
7	Jersey City
8	Concord
9	Houston
10	Oakland

 

edm  

1	Irvine
2	Hoboken
3	San Jose
4	Fremont
5	Santa Clara
6	Berkeley
7	State College
8	Reno
9	Sunnyvale
10	Bellevue

 

electro house  

1	Hoboken
2	Irvine
3	San Jose
4	Fremont
5	Santa Clara
6	Berkeley
7	New York
8	State College
9	Boston
10	Sunnyvale

 

folk  

1	Nashville
2	Charleston
3	Louisville
4	Raleigh
5	Portland OR
6	Chapel Hill
7	Birmingham
8	Greenville
9	Knoxville
10	Wilmington NC

 

freak folk  

1	Portland OR
2	Brooklyn
3	Seattle
4	Cambridge
5	San Francisco
6	Somerville
7	Santa Monica
8	Athens
9	Austin
10	Denton

 

g funk  

1	Hayward
2	Concord
3	Oakland
4	Sacramento
5	Stockton
6	San Jose
7	Fresno
8	Fremont
9	Los Angeles
10	Whittier

 

hip hop  

1	Hartford
2	Silver Spring
3	Worcester
4	Ann Arbor
5	Farmington
6	Philadelphia
7	Wilmington DE
8	Tampa
9	Boca Raton
10	Hyattsville

 

house  

1	Hoboken
2	Irvine
3	San Jose
4	Fremont
5	Santa Clara
6	Berkeley
7	State College
8	Sunnyvale
9	Reno
10	Orange

 

hurban  

1	Miami
2	Hollywood FL
3	Hialeah
4	Fort Lauderdale
5	Newark
6	West Palm Beach
7	Jersey City
8	The Bronx
9	El Paso
10	Miami Beach

 

hyphy  

1	Concord
2	Hayward
3	Sacramento
4	Stockton
5	Oakland
6	Fresno
7	San Jose
8	Fremont
9	Santa Clara
10	San Francisco

 

indie folk  

1	Portland OR
2	Somerville
3	Cambridge
4	Madison
5	Eugene
6	Spokane
7	Louisville
8	Milwaukee
9	New Haven
10	Durham

 

indie pop  

1	Portland OR
2	Somerville
3	Austin
4	Cambridge
5	Chicago
6	New Orleans
7	Seattle
8	Eugene
9	Lawrence
10	Milwaukee

 

indie rock  

1	Portland OR
2	Chicago
3	Cambridge
4	Somerville
5	Seattle
6	Austin
7	Columbus
8	Tempe
9	San Diego
10	St. Louis

 

indietronica  

1	Santa Monica
2	San Francisco
3	Portland OR
4	Seattle
5	New York
6	San Diego
7	Bellevue
8	Pasadena
9	Anchorage
10	Brooklyn

 

jam band  

1	Boulder
2	Athens
3	Denver
4	Fort Collins
5	Charleston
6	Birmingham
7	Columbia SC
8	Baton Rouge
9	New Orleans
10	Wilmington NC

 

jerk  

1	Stockton
2	Hayward
3	Sacramento
4	Oakland
5	Concord
6	Fremont
7	Corona
8	San Jose
9	Bakersfield
10	Phoenix

 

latin  

1	El Paso
2	Miami
3	Hialeah
4	Miami Beach
5	Hollywood FL
6	Fort Lauderdale
7	Boca Raton
8	West Palm Beach
9	Mesquite
10	Jersey City

 

lo-fi  

1	Portland OR
2	Austin
3	Seattle
4	Cambridge
5	Chicago
6	Somerville
7	Brooklyn
8	Santa Monica
9	Cincinnati
10	Louisville

 

mariachi  

1	Mountain View
2	Newark
3	Mesquite
4	Irving
5	Concord
6	Jersey City
7	Oakland
8	Santa Ana
9	El Paso
10	Dallas

 

norteno  

1	Mountain View
2	Mesquite
3	Irving
4	Newark
5	Concord
6	Oakland
7	Santa Ana
8	Anaheim
9	Bakersfield
10	Houston

 

nu gaze  

1	Portland OR
2	Brooklyn
3	Santa Monica
4	Seattle
5	San Francisco
6	San Diego
7	Pasadena
8	Lawrence
9	New Orleans
10	New York

 

outlaw country  

1	Fort Worth
2	Grand Prairie
3	Frisco
4	College Station
5	Lewisville
6	Lubbock
7	Spring
8	Dallas
9	San Antonio
10	Arlington TX

 

pop  

1	Gilbert
2	Pompano Beach
3	Chandler
4	Trenton
5	Las Vegas
6	Plano
7	Santa Clara
8	Anchorage
9	Vancouver
10	Fresno

 

pop punk  

1	Mesa
2	Virginia Beach
3	Trenton
4	Chandler
5	Buffalo
6	Gilbert
7	Pittsburgh
8	Tucson
9	Colorado Springs
10	East Lansing

 

progressive bluegrass  

1	Denver
2	Boulder
3	Fort Collins
4	Raleigh
5	Charleston
6	Knoxville
7	Chapel Hill
8	Greenville
9	Louisville
10	Nashville

 

r&b  

1	Baltimore
2	Detroit
3	Atlanta
4	Greensboro
5	Memphis
6	Philadelphia
7	Hyattsville
8	Richmond
9	Norfolk
10	Las Vegas

 

r-neg-b  

1	San Francisco
2	Santa Monica
3	New York
4	Brooklyn
5	Providence
6	Seattle
7	Pasadena
8	Portland OR
9	Baltimore
10	Hyattsville

 

ranchera  

1	Mountain View
2	Newark
3	Mesquite
4	Irving
5	Concord
6	Jersey City
7	Oakland
8	Santa Ana
9	Dallas
10	Los Angeles

 

reggaeton  

1	Hialeah
2	Miami
3	Hollywood FL
4	Fort Lauderdale
5	West Palm Beach
6	Orlando
7	Boca Raton
8	Miami Beach
9	Tampa
10	Jersey City

 

shimmer pop  

1	St. Louis
2	Santa Monica
3	Lawrence
4	San Francisco
5	Kansas City
6	Overland Park
7	Littleton
8	Colorado Springs
9	Aurora
10	Bellevue

 

stomp and holler  

1	Portland OR
2	Somerville
3	Louisville
4	Minneapolis
5	Wilmington NC
6	Cambridge
7	Eugene
8	Madison
9	Milwaukee
10	Spokane

 

synthpop  

1	San Francisco
2	Santa Monica
3	New York
4	Tucson
5	Pasadena
6	San Diego
7	Tempe
8	Bellevue
9	Chicago
10	Gainesville

 

trap music  

1	Charlotte
2	Memphis
3	Humble
4	Richmond
5	Farmington
6	Silver Spring
7	Orlando
8	Toledo
9	Baton Rouge
10	Katy

 

west coast rap  

1	Hayward
2	Concord
3	Sacramento
4	Oakland
5	Stockton
6	San Jose
7	Fresno
8	Fremont
9	Los Angeles
10	Whittier

 

worship  

1	Springfield MO
2	Grand Rapids
3	Spokane
4	Tulsa
5	Birmingham
6	St. Paul
7	Oklahoma City
8	Greenville
9	Knoxville
10	Murfreesboro

 
 

This might also be the preface for a volume of sociology essays.

Every Noise at Once has long existed in shades of gray. This isn't because I don't like colors. I've actually tried a few different ways to add color, mostly through inelegant expedients, but none of them seemed to me to be adding more clarity than confusion.  

I'm not entirely certain this one doesn't also suffer that flaw, but in the spirit of experimentation, I'm going to go ahead and publish it. If it makes us unhappy, I can always go back to gray. So here:  


The idea is to semi-subliminally surface some of the other analytical dimensions from the underlying music space, beyond the two that drive the XY axes, so that there's a little less visual flattening.  

For example, in the section on the right, above, you can see the reddish color running from "garage punk blues" to "experimental rock" to "more classic garage rock" and "psychedelic blues-rock", and the light blue linking "alternative new age" to "abstract" to "new tribe". These are good associative threads.  

And the maps within each genre (psychedelic blues-rock on the left, below, and abstract on the right) show both overall corresponding tints, and variable degrees of internal uniformity:  


Logistically, this works by mapping three additional acoustic metrics into the red, green and blue color-channels. I arrived at this particular combination through not-at-all-exhaustive experimentation, so maybe I'll come up with a better one, but for the moment red is energy, green is dynamic variation, and blue is instrumentalness. I don't recommend trying to think too hard about this, as the combinatory effects are kind of hard to parse, but it gives your eye things to follow. As data-presentation this is rather undisciplined, but as computational evocation it seems potentially interesting nonetheless.  

Which you could say of music, too.

As part of a conference on Music and Genre at McGill University in Montreal, over this past weekend, I served as the non-academic curiosity at the center of a round-table discussion about the nature of musical genres, and of the natures of efforts to understand genres, and of the natures of efforts to understand the efforts to understand genres. Plus or minus one or two levels of abstraction, I forget exactly.  

My "talk" to open this conversation was not strictly scripted to begin with, and I ended up rewriting my oblique speaking notes more or less over from scratch as the day was going on, anyway. One section, which I added as I listened to other people talk about the kinds of distinctions that "genres" represent, attempted to list some of the kinds of genres I have in my deliberately multi-definitional genre map. There ended up being so many of these that I mentioned only a selection of them during the talk. So here, for extended (potential) amusement, is the whole list I had on my screen:  
 

Kinds of Genres
(And note that this isn't even one kind of kind of genre...)  

- conventional genre (jazz, reggae)
- subgenre (calypso, sega, samba, barbershop)
- region (malaysian pop, lithumania)
- language (rock en espanol, hip hop tuga, telugu, malayalam)
- historical distance (vintage swing, traditional country)
- scene (slc indie, canterbury scene, juggalo, usbm)
- faction (east coast hip hop, west coast rap)
- aesthetic (ninja, complextro, funeral doom)
- politics (riot grrrl, vegan straight edge, unblack metal)
- aspirational identity (viking metal, gangster rap, skinhead oi, twee pop)
- retrospective clarity (protopunk, classic peruvian pop, emo punk)
- jokes that stuck (crack rock steady, chamber pop, fourth world)
- influence (britpop, italo disco, japanoise)
- micro-feud (dubstep, brostep, filthstep, trapstep)
- technology (c64, harp)
- totem (digeridu, new tribe, throat singing, metal guitar)
- isolationism (faeroese pop, lds, wrock)
- editorial precedent (c86, zolo, illbient)
- utility (meditation, chill-out, workout, belly dance)
- cultural (christmas, children's music, judaica)
- occasional (discofox, qawaali, disco polo)
- implicit politics (chalga, nsbm, dangdut)
- commerce (coverchill, guidance)
- assumed listening perspective (beatdown, worship, comic)
- private community (orgcore, ectofolk)
- dominant features (hip hop, metal, reggaeton)
- period (early music, ska revival)
- perspective of provenance (classical (composers), orchestral (performers))
- emergent self-identity (skweee, progressive rock)
- external label (moombahton, laboratorio, fallen angel)
- gender (boy band, girl group)
- distribution (viral pop, idol, commons, anime score, show tunes)
- cultural institution (tin pan alley, brill building pop, nashville sound)
- mechanism (mashup, hauntology, vaporwave)
- radio format (album rock, quiet storm, hurban)
- multiple dimensions (german ccm, hindustani classical)
- marketing (world music, lounge, modern classical, new age)
- performer demographics (military band, british brass band)
- arrangement (jazz trio, jug band, wind ensemble)
- competing terminology (hip hop, rap; mpb, brazilian pop music)
- intentions (tribute, fake)
- introspective fractality (riddim, deep house, chaotic black metal)
- opposition (alternative rock, r-neg-b, progressive bluegrass)
- otherness (noise, oratory, lowercase, abstract, outsider)
- parallel terminology (gothic symphonic metal, gothic americana, gothic post-punk; garage rock, uk garage)
- non-self-explanatory (fingerstyle, footwork, futurepop, jungle)
- invented distinctions (shimmer pop, shiver pop; soul flow, flick hop)
- nostalgia (new wave, no wave, new jack swing, avant-garde, adult standards)
- defense (relaxative, neo mellow)  
 

That was at the beginning of the talk. At the end I had a different attempt at an amusement prepared, which was a short outline of my mental draft of the paper I would write about genre evolution, if I wrote papers. In a way this is also a way of listing kinds of kinds of things:  
 

The Every-Noise-at-Once Unified Theory of Musical Genre Evolution

1. There is a status quo;
   
2. Somebody becomes dissatisfied with it;
   
3. Several somebodies find common ground in their various dissatisfactions;
   
4. Somebody gives this common ground a name, and now we have Thing;
   
5. The people who made thing before it was called Thing are now joined by people who know Thing as it is named, and have thus set out to make Thing deliberately, and now we have Thing and Modern Thing, or else Classic Thing and Thing, depending on whether it happened before or after we graduated from college;
   
6. Eventually there's enough gravity around Thing for people to start trying to make Thing that doesn't get sucked into the rest of Thing, and thus we get Alternative Thing, which is the non-Thing thing that some people know about, and Deep Thing, which is the non-Thing thing that only the people who make Deep Thing know;
   
7. By now we can retroactively identify Proto-Thing, which is the stuff before Thing that sounds kind of thingy to us now that we know Thing;
   
8. Thing eventually gets reintegrated into the mainstream, and we get Pop Thing;
   
9. Pop Thing tarnishes the whole affair for some people, who head off grumpily into Post Thing;
   
10. But Post Thing is kind of dreary, and some people set out to restore the original sense of whatever it was, and we get Neo-Thing;
    
11. Except Neo-Thing isn't quite the same as the original Thing, so we get Neo-Traditional Thing, for people who wish none of this ever happened except the original Thing;
    
12. But Neo-Thing and Neo-Traditional Thing are both kind of precious, and some people who like Thing still also want to be rock stars, and so we get Nu Thing;
    
13. And this is all kind of fractal, so you could search-and-replace Thing with Post Thing or Pop Thing or whatever, and after a couple iterations you can quickly end up with Post-Neo-Traditional Pop Post-Thing.

 

And it would be awesome.  
 
 
 
 

[Also, although I was the one glaringly anomalous non-academic at this academic conference, let posterity record the cover of the conference program.]  

At Spotify, where I work, we have listeners in a large and growing numbers of countries around the world. You might theorize that people in different countries listen to different music. You might be curious to hear this music. If you are me, you might be really curious, to the point of a kind of obsessive, consuming fear that there is awesome and bizarre and wonderful music in, say, Estonia, that you're not hearing.  

We do, in fact, have per-country top-track charts in Spotify itself. These measure the absolute popularity of tracks among the sub-population listening in a given country. Statistically, though, these charts tend to be fairly well dominated by global hits. This isn't a technical flaw, but it does mean that those charts are not especially useful for the purpose of musical tourism. When I say I want to hear what they're listening to in Estonia, I mean that I want to hear what they're listening to Estonia that, proportionally speaking, nobody is listening to anywhere else. I want to hear the music that is most uniquely Estonian, or more precisely the music that is most uniquely loved by Estonians.  

So I've been experimenting with code to generate the kind of additional alternate chart that I mean, measuring the most distinctive listening of a country. It's not perfect, and the occasional global hit wanders in due to emotionally irrelevant factors like regional licensing contingencies. But for the most part these charts do appear to be rather effectively getting past the global to the local.  

I was going to share an alphabetized list of these, for anybody who shares my curiosity. But I have this code to produce visual maps of music groupings, and it's just as easy to feed it countries as it is to feed it genres. And thus I've done the somewhat bizarre exercise of producing a visual remapping of inherently geographic data using non-geographic coordinates.  

This sounds silly, I think. But it turns out to be surprisingly interesting. Here's the map:  

 

This is a readability-adjusted scatter-plot of two acoustic variables averaged across a few thousand of the most popular and representative songs from each country.  

The vertical axis is a metric quality we call "bounciness", so the countries at the top are characterized by denser and more atmospheric music, and the countries at the bottom are characterized by sparer music with spikier beats and more space between them. E.g., the constant roar of atmospheric black metal or the slow humming whir of classical organ music would be at the top, and the jumpy beats of hip hop or the pulse of reggae would be at the bottom.  

The horizontal axis is another score we call "organism". The countries towards the left are characterized by music with more electric arrangements and/or more mechanical rhythms. The extreme of this quality gets you relentless techno. The countries towards the right are characterized by music with more acoustic arrangements and/or more human and variable rhythms. The extremes of this get you jigs and reels, or sitars.  

[The main genre map is the other way around, with bounciness from left to right, and organism up and down, but this way we get Scandinavia at the non-geographic north, and China and India towards the non-geographic east!]  

But what's intriguing here, obviously, is not where individual countries appear, but which countries cluster together. Japan, Australia and Canada all basically fall into acoustic Scandinavia. Africa and the Caribbean form a unified acoustic southern hemisphere. Malaysia is acoustically closer to Slovakia than to China, and Lebanon is acoustically closer to South Korea and Mexico than to Iran. I feel like we are detecting at least the faint echoes of a kind of cultural truth.  

Click any country to see the calculated playlist of the 100 most distinctively popular songs in that country. You need Spotify for this to work, and as you'll discover, in some cases international publishing rights work counter to personal curiosity, and less than 100 will actually be available for you to stream. If you're extra-curious, in Spotify Preferences you can uncheck "Hide unplayable tracks", and then you'll at least get to see all 100.  

Estonia turns out to be pretty much exactly as awesome as I imagined it had to be if I could only hear it.

The Guardian today published a piece by Rob Fitzpatrick that I think is now my favorite thing written about my genre map, because instead of being about the map, it's about the music he found using the map.  

One of the things I've been experimenting with at work is finding music by how distinctively it appeals to particular audiences. Mostly we're interested in regional and demographic slices, but out of idle curiosity I tried running the same code against hours of the day.  

That is, for each hour in the day I calculated which songs were most disproportionately played during that particular hour as opposed to in general (by US listeners). From this I was able to assemble a compressed 24-song time-lapse exaggeration of the sounds and biases of the American day.  

 

Our caricatured day starts at dawn with a gentle, soothing Jonsí wake-up. It gets a little preachy (literally) over breakfast, but then Seinabo Sey and Shawn Mendes slowly add some restrained alertness as the coffee takes effect. Spoon and Jason Aldean and Sam Smith carry us unhurriedly through late morning and lunch.  

Early afternoon is, apparently, the official time-slot for imported Australian boy-pop, as 5 Seconds of Summer and Troye Sivan sigh and swoon for a couple songs. I can't really explain what O.A.R. is doing after that, but then it's a solid block of modern (and largely not child-suitable) pop/hip-hop straight through dinner (including, amusingly, a song called "2AM" that is very definitely more popular at 2PM than 2AM).  

Eventually I guess the hip-hop kids go to bed, and the indie/pop-punk kids stay up a little later to briefly rock.  

Then it's nighttime, and we get increasingly meditative with Jon Hopkins, Hans Zimmer and Ludovico Einaudi for a while before resorting (and the data really do indicate this) to actual background noise for a couple solid restorative hours of REM sleep.  
 

[My own daily listening bears no resemblance to this, at all. Nor, I suspect, does any individual's. But the thing has more internal logic than I expected it to have, actually, so there it is.]  
 

[Or, if you'd rather, this:]