Music Industry

The Geography of Music Superstars

I have a brother-in-law who specializes in linking geography to pop culture, a gig that somehow gets him postings all over the world. I need to forward this article to him. How does geography impact on where we find our biggest music superstars? This is from CityLab.

This Sunday marks the 32nd anniversary of the VMAs, an event by now as legendary for its controversial stunts as its iconic performances. But no matter what crazy antics may appear on the stage each year, pop music has always been at the heart of the award show. VMA performances have helped catapult artists like Britney Spears, Taylor Swift, and Miley Cyrus to the highest echelons of pop stardom. And yet long before “vogueing” or “twerking,” the original pop stars—Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Elvis, and the Beatles of course—were as, or even more, dominant on the pop music scene.

These artists all came from different times and different backgrounds, but an interesting question remains: To what degree is pop stardom propelled by a select set of cities? Have pop music’s centers changed since the old school days of crooners and rock and roll? Or are there cities that continue to produce the world’s leading pop stars?

To gain insight into pop music’s leading centers or scenes, I turned to Patrick Adler, a Ph.D. student in urban planning at UCLA and a Martin Prosperity Institute (MPI) alum. Adler developed a database for the world’s top-selling pop stars from 1950 to 2014 based on the 50 top-selling artists of each decade from the 1950s to the 2000s and the 18 top-selling artists for the years 2010 to 2014. The information comes from Music Industry Data, a standard source for music data used by social scientists, which tracks global album and singles sales for more than six decades across more than 30 countries.

Adler then used biographical resources like the All Music Guide and artist biographies to identify where these pop stars were born, where they lived when their hits broke, and where their music labels were located. Because some of these stars changed locations over time, Adler allocated them to the cities where their first hit song broke in a given decade. So, for example, the Beatles are identified as a Liverpool band in the 1960s, but a London band in the 1970s. Ultimately, Adler generated a locational database for 258 pop stars.

Keep reading. And Stuart? We need to do a paper together on this.

Alan Cross

is an internationally known broadcaster, interviewer, writer, consultant, blogger and speaker. In his 40+ years in the music business, Alan has interviewed the biggest names in rock, from David Bowie and U2 to Pearl Jam and the Foo Fighters. He’s also known as a musicologist and documentarian through programs like The Ongoing History of New Music.

Alan Cross has 38019 posts and counting. See all posts by Alan Cross

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