While only Nashville bears the moniker "Music City," it's far from the only area to have a claim to music fame. From Michigan's Motown era and Seattle's foray into grunge to Austin's live music explosion, several other cities and states have earned recognition for their musical prowess over the years. But when you set aside snappy nicknames, famous recording studios, and bands long since broken up, you'll find that music is nothing without its fans – so that's exactly who we set out to find. Using 220,000 tweets about 125 popular bands and artists, we investigated which singers and genres score big with Twitter users around the country and which U.S. states are actually talking the talk when it comes to their reputation as music lovers.
Most Popular Artists on Twitter
Claiming nearly a third of the top 10 artist/band's tweets is One Direction. While the top 10 list boasts a heavy majority of fellow pop superstars, a few other genres garner the attention of tweeters: Latin (Pitbull), country (Luke Bryan), and R&B/hip-hop (Nicki Minaj). Take a look at the whole breakdown:
Breakdown of Music Genres on Twitter
While saying that pop music is popular is a little like pointing out that cupcakes are cake, you can't argue with the fact that nearly half of all music-related tweets fall into the "pop" category. That being said, there are many ways to measure trends, and, by some standards, pop music isn't living up to its name as much as you might think. Take this report from the International Music Summit, for example, which shows that pop music suffered the greatest loss (-15%) in digital sales of any genre in 2013, while only dance/electronic music saw positive growth and was at an all-time high in 2014. Additionally, when it comes to music sales and consumption, rock was king, accounting for almost twice as much activity as pop. So why the disproportionate display here? It probably has a little something to do with the fact that 35% of Twitter users are under the age of 30, giving any data collected from it a distinct young flavor and millennial bias.
Interactive Map: Artist/Band Mentions on Twitter
Now, we know what you're thinking: That's all great, but you haven't told us who wins the Twitter war between Selena Gomez and Demi Lovato or whether the country is "All About That Bass" as much as Meghan Trainor is. Lucky for you, we've created an interactive map that lets you track Twitter mentions for your favorite songsters so you can locate like-minded fans. You can also compare the reach of your two country music crushes.(For the record, Demi is slightly more popular than Selena, and Rhode Island is ALL about that bass).
Select a band/musician
Tweets Per 1 Million Residents
Each Music Genre's Most Popular Artists/Bands on Twitter
While One Direction, T. Swift, and Drake together make up more than 60% of the total mentions in the pop category, Luke Bryan, Nicki Minaj, Twenty One Pilots, and Zedd take the lead in their respective genres. When it comes to the world of Latin music, Mr. Worldwide (Cuban-American Pitbull) leaps way ahead of fellow cantantes, including runner-up J. Balvin.
Top 10 Artists/Bands With Positive Tweets
But looking at Twitter mentions only paints half the picture, so we dove even deeper into the tweets to figure out how the top 10 changes when you factor in whether the messages about them have anything nice to say. Using that metric we found the list to be musically diverse boasting Pop, Rock, Country, and Latin artists. Taylor Swift soared to the number 1 spot followed by Muse and Mr. Worldwide. As every middle schooler learns the hard way, being talked about and being loved are evidently not the same thing. But we're sure T. Swift would tell those who didn't make the cut to shake it off because, after all, the haters gonna hate … or at least she would if she had any haters.
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Methodology
Musical genres were determined from recent Billboard charts.
To obtain the data for this project, we scraped Twitter's geotagged tweets with mentions/hashtags of 125 popular artists/bands. Popularity was based on artists/bands with at least one song on a recent Billboard chart.
On "Twitter's Most Talked About Musicians" interactive map, Washington, D.C. was excluded from results because often it was altering results but not visible on the map.
New Mexico overwhelmingly shows the most tweets per one million residents for Demi Lovato which could be attributed to it being her home state.
Artists within the Dance/Electronic genre consistently win in Nevada which may be because of it's growing Electronic music scene and popularity of live shows within that genre.
ILoveMemphis showed the most tweets in Tennessee. Some of the tweets may not have been related to the band, but rather tweeted by tourists in the City of Memphis.
Sentiment was determined using IBM AlchemyAPI. We fed the tweets' text into the API and received a numerical score from -1 to +1 for each, with -1 being most negative and +1 most positive. Each also come back with a text label of "positive", "negative", or "neutral".
Tweets examined for this project were posted between the time frame of June 1, 2014 and November 2, 2015.
Feel free to share the images found on this page freely. When doing so, please attribute the authors by providing a link back to this page, so your readers can learn more about this project and the related research.
