Gracenote's Music Map

Gracenote, the company that usually provides the album information when you rip a CD, launched an interesting Music Map application that shows the "popularity" of artists and albums by region and country in many parts of the world. It does this based on how often Gracenote's database is queried about particular albums or artists. Link to Flash map (Thanks, Gabriel "TuneUp" Adiv!)

• [Tim the Pedant]

  I’m not convinced… surely U2 can’t be that popular!

  In India the number 7 entry is Backstreet Boys, whilst Depeche Mode is at number 3 in Russia.

  How reliable is this software? And who is being measured?

• [okkoto]

  jesus! people like the beatles

• [Matthew Miller]

  Gracenote is the company that took the previously open source cddb program and all of the user-contributed data and said “Surprise! You thought this was an open project, but really it’s our way to get rich off the dot-com boom, suckers. Thanks for all the data — now, you get to pay us licensing fees to use it!”

  I suggest everyone use FreeDB, http://www.freedb.org/ instead.

• [slawkenbergius]

  Funny that the top 10 artists are mainly 60s/70s supergroups, with a nice selection from the UK. Pity none of our homegrown talent seems to be doing so well nowadays. Is Radiohead the only British band to have made it big overseas recently, or is there anyone else?

  (Crossing my fingers the name Coldplay doesn’t come up.)

• [tehmoth]

  not sure what software david uses, but most of the ripping software i’ve used uses freedb.org’s database. You can download the whole thing from them if you wished.

• [kirbluke]

  wow stadium arcadium is such a popular record. and so mediocre…