Earlier this week, music technology company The Echo Nest shared a map that showed the most “distinctive” artist for each of the United States. The methodology used to come up with that was pretty complicated, and the post went pretty viral. So naturally many people thought the map showed each state’s “favorite” artists. To remedy the confusion, The Echo Nest’s Paul Lamere has now posted the map (above) of each state’s favorite artist, and it turns out, there really isn’t a whole lot of state-by-state variety. Mainly it’s Jay Z in the East, Macklemore & Ryan Lewis in the Northwest, and Drake in the Southwest, with assorted fiefdoms for Daft Punk, Eminem, Lorde, Imagine Dragons, and somehow Alt-J. Lemore also clarified the source of the statistics, saying they’re drawn from the activities of 250,000 online music listeners — so the sample size for some states might not be large (sorry, Alt-J) . And the map below highlights “favorite artist regions.” Pretty fun, though not as fun as blissfully believing Oregon’s favorite artist was Kurt Vile. (Hat tip to Ned Raggett.)
UPDATE: Here’s the map of each state’s most ignored artist. And Spotify has bought The Echo Nest, the company behind the maps.
