Leader - Follower network for Indie music in Europe
Think of a hipster city, one that latches on to music trends early and throws them off before they become stale. Seattle? New York? London? Try again: Oslo, Dublin and Atlanta top the charts in a study by UCD researchers Prof Pádraig Cunningham and Conrad Lee, published on the online scientific forum Physics arXiv at http://arxiv.org/pdf/1204.2677v1.pdf.
By studying listening data from the Internet radio Last.fm - and borrowing some analysis tips from pigeons - they mapped the preferences in more than 200 cities over around three years and saw who the trendsetters and followers were.
“Last.fm logs data about what people are listening to,” explains Professor Cunningham, who is Professor of Knowledge and Data Engineering at UCD School of Computer Science & Informatics. He and PhD student Lee analysed the ‘scrobbles’, or bits of data, and mapped them geographically for various music genres.
And unsurprisingly, certain groups of countries tended to bond together in musical taste. “Ireland clusters in with the UK and Australia clusters in with New Zealand and then at the next level up they cluster with Canada - there seems to be a British Empire thing going on,” says Professor Cunningham. “And the German speaking countries and the South American countries also cluster together.”
To get a more dynamic picture, Cunningham and Lee looked to a recent study of pigeons that used GPS tracking to work out which birds led and which followed.
“That kind of analysis can be adapted to look at the music listening data,” explains Profesor Cunningham. “And we showed that systematically there are cities that lead other cities - the trends happen there first and they get picked up in other cities later on.”
Taking all music together, Atlanta led the trends in North America, while for indie music, Montreal and Toronto were the leaders with Denver and Seattle are at the bottom. “That’s surprising, we always would have thought of Seattle as a hipster place,” says Professor Cunningham.
For hip-hop, Atlanta was again the trailblazer, along with Chicago and Toronto, with Austin and Denver and even New York City lagging behind. Meanwhile in Europe, Oslo Dublin and Paris were among the hipster cities setting the trends.
“It’s hard to explain how this influence manifests itself but it is clear that it is there,” says Professor Cunningham. There are some limitations to the study - not least that the listening habits of people who tune into Last.fm may not represent the wider public. But the general approach of spotting trendsetters is an important component of the wider research carried out by the Science Foundation Ireland-funded Clique Research Cluster, which Professor Cunningham directs.
“We have a collaboration with Storyful, we analyse news trends on Twitter and try and identify authoritative sources associated with particular news stories,” he offers as an example of ongoing research. “In any situation where there is a lot of data available, you have this potential to identify how trends move around the world, and it’s interesting to be able to identify where these trends start.”
Professor Pádraig Cunningham was interviewed by freelance journalist Dr Claire O'Connell
