The Cities That Are Most Influential To Music

While London, New York and Paris are the leaders in fashion, it's been assumed that the media centers of Los Angeles, Nashville, New York and London do the same for music. Now 2 researchers from the Clique Research Cluster in Ireland have research that compiles data from 200 cities going back to 2003 that finally sifts through 60 billion pieces of data to finally determine if that assumption is really true.

What did they find? It appears that we've had it all wrong all this time. The study showed the following:

• Montreal leads North America in its influence on indie music, while Paris does the same in Europe.

• Surprisingly, Oslo leads in overall influence in all music of Europe.

• Atlanta drives hip hop (no surprise there).

• Richmond, Virginia and Columbus, Ohio are more influential for new music that New York.

• Surprisingly enough, the major cities of New York, LA, London and Chicago placed near the middle of the influence chart in all parts of the study.

Although there's a tremendous amount of data involved, I'm not so sure that the results are the last word in world listening habits after reading the report. But it does prove that many of our long held assumptions may not be correct either. The lesson here is that what we knew was a fact before may not be now in our Music 3.0 world.

-----------------------------------

Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.