The Metropolis

Londoners are followers not leaders in music taste, says reputable study

Mike Pollitt | Friday 20 April, 2012 11:45

Two academics in Dublin compared Last FM listening habits in various cities. You know how Londoners are really cool and happening and listen to all the cool new music first? Well you don’t.

Conrad Lee and Pádraig Cunningham’s paper (PDF) looked at different cities and analysed where Last FM subscribers were listening to new music first. They say:

“London’s unremarkable position is…noteworthy”.

So as a city our musical taste is not cool and current, it’s “unremarkable”. Hurts, doesn’t it?

The image above, for Indie music, shows this admirably. In simple terms, the higher up the city and and the bigger the orange circle next to it, the earlier Last FM listerners there are listening to new tracks.

Conrad Lee, not being a journalist, has helpfully set out some headline-unfriendly caveats:

1: It’s all based on Last.fm data
2: We haven’t yet shown our model of flow to be predictive
3: We just indicate which cities are ahead, we don’t know why (leaders may not be ‘influencers’)

But he agreed over email that “the results show London is not the musical trendsetter we might have expected.”

So there you have it. You people need to raise your game.

Conrad Lee and Pádraig Cunningham (PDF) – The Geographic Flow of Music
Conrad Lee – blog post explaining the results and offering some caveats
Technology Review – Network Science Reveals The Cities That Lead The World’s Music Listening Habits
Image – Courtesy of the authors

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