Extracting cultural groups from pop music
In a more globalised world, pop music is more general
If you spent some time exploring the plot in post about BPM values of international pop songs, you may have noticed that some songs made the Top 50 lists of multiple countries. This observations presents some obvious question: How many songs end up on multiple lists, how often does this happen, and why does this happen?
If your national language is spoken in many other countries, you will likely be aware that a lot of the music that becomes popular in radio play may come from another country. For example, the top charts of English speaking countries are often quite similar and occupied by songs from the UK, the US, and others with no clear differentiation.
With similar language may come similar cultural aspects. This is an extremely complicated statement that would take several degrees, and a massive amount of sources and data to corroborate, but in lieu of that we can start to infer similarities in a countries’ modern culture by looking at how much of their pop music is also popular in other countries.
This post presents a series of graphs that, once again using the Spotify Top 50 playlists, shows how many songs in a countries Top 50 list are also in another countries’ list. The countries here are ordered by their distance away and that can be seen by hovering over any point.
Some fairly obvious relationships are clear. Australia and New Zealand share a lot of their pop music, and lots of songs are shared between the group of Asian countries that are included in the data set. Some relationships are more strange though. Music popular in New Zealand is general fairly popular in the rest of the world, and Turkey has almost no songs in other countries top lists.
A final nice observation is that you can clearly see the effects of national languages. There is a strong relation between the Spanish speaking countries, and Americans share the closest preference links with the UK, Australia, and New Zealand.
(If viewing on mobile, make sure to switch to landscape mode)