Tristan Hotham

Researcher of campaigns and platforms. Maker of other things.

Where the world’s music comes from

Title card reading 'Where the world's music comes from' in black, red and gold on cream, beside a world map of hexagons shaded from pale yellow to deep plum by the number of musicians born there, darkest in central Europe, the eastern United States and Japan. Text: the birthplaces of 283,424 musicians and the home towns of 29,489 bands in Wikidata.

Every musician was born somewhere, and every band started somewhere. I mapped the birthplaces of 283,424 musicians and the home towns of 29,489 bands in Wikidata to see which cities made them, where each genre lives, how the map moved over three centuries, and where the women are.

Explore the interactive version
Read the paper

Wikidata, the open database behind Wikipedia, records 478,552 people whose occupation is musician or one of its many varieties: composers and singers, organists and rappers, DJs, conductors, fado singers and kobzars. It also records 115,219 bands, choirs, orchestras and other musical groups. For 291,579 of the musicians it knows the country of birth, and for 283,424 the birthplace has coordinates.

So I put them all on one map. The interactive version switches between musicians and bands, filters by kind of musician, family of genres, gender and fame, and has a decade slider you can play like a record. Click any hexagon and you get the people or bands from there, best known first.

World map of musicians' birthplaces counted in hexagons: darkest across central and western Europe, with dense clusters in the eastern United States, Japan, Korea, Brazil and Argentina, and lighter, scattered hexagons across Africa and Central Asia
Where 283,424 musicians in Wikidata were born. Darker hexagons hold more musicians.

New York, London, Paris and Vienna

Wikidata often records a district rather than a city, Brooklyn or Hollywood or a Paris arrondissement, so I grouped every birthplace within 25 km of a city of 200,000 people or more. New York comes first with 6,124 musicians, then London (4,627), Paris (4,466) and Vienna (4,102), with Tokyo the first city outside Europe and the Americas. As a single place, Vienna is the most common birthplace of all.

Bands have a different map. Los Angeles is where most bands in Wikidata were formed (1,454), ahead of New York and London, with San Francisco and Seattle not far behind. Per head of today’s population, the band towns are Ljubljana, Bergen, Malmö and Oslo, with Liverpool, the British leader on both counts, close behind.

Two bar charts. Left, musicians born in each city: New York 6,124, London 4,627, Paris 4,466, Vienna 4,102, then Tokyo, Berlin, Prague, Los Angeles, Budapest and Buenos Aires. Right, bands formed in each city: Los Angeles 1,454, New York 1,380, London 1,023, then Tokyo, San Francisco, Seoul, Jakarta and Seattle
Musicians born, and bands formed, within 25 km of each city.

Two maps of music

The kind of musician changes the map completely. Composers born before 1900 were 88% European: Vienna leads with 850, then Paris, London, Prague, Berlin, Naples and Barcelona. Pop, rock and metal musicians born since 1940 are only 48% European, and the map spreads to the United States, Japan, Indonesia and Brazil. Conductors are the most European kind of musician (80%); rappers are as likely to come from North America as from Europe.

Two world maps of hexagons. Left, composers born before 1900, concentrated almost entirely in central and western Europe with thin scatterings in the eastern United States and South America. Right, pop, rock and metal musicians born since 1940, spread across Europe, North America, Japan, South East Asia, Brazil and Australia
Composers born before 1900 (left) and pop, rock and metal musicians born since 1940 (right).

Every genre has a home town

Some music is everywhere, but some has an address. Of all the K-pop acts on the map, musicians born or bands formed, 52% are from Seoul. Rio de Janeiro has 57% of samba, Buenos Aires 52% of tango, Lisbon 49% of fado, Hong Kong 74% of cantopop, London 56% of grime and Kingston 23% of reggae. Black metal’s capital is Oslo, with Bergen second, grunge’s is Seattle and Afrobeats’ is Lagos.

Bar chart of each genre's share of acts in its top city: cantopop in Hong Kong 74 per cent, samba in Rio de Janeiro 57, grime in London 56, tango in Buenos Aires 52, K-pop in Seoul 52, fado in Lisbon 49, then sardana in Barcelona, bossa nova in Rio, trot in Seoul, chanson in Paris, J-pop in Tokyo, reggae in Kingston, flamenco in Cádiz, Carnatic music in Chennai, grunge in Seattle, Afrobeats in Lagos and dancehall in Kingston
The home town of each genre, and its share of all that genre’s acts on the map.

Country music is the interesting exception. Country acts are spread right across the United States, so Nashville has only 5% of them. But turn the question round and Nashville stands out more than anywhere: its acts are 13.0 times as likely as the world’s to be country. By the same measure, New Orleans is jazz’s city, Atlanta hip hop’s and Detroit soul’s.

Finland has 84.8 metal bands in Wikidata for every million people. The United States has 6.7.

The Nordic band countries

Per head, the Nordic countries are band countries. Finland has 553.8 bands per million people, Norway 376.4 and Sweden 266.2. For metal the gap is wider still: Finland 84.8, Sweden 56.2, Norway 55.5, Germany 12.3. Part of that is real, a famously metal-loving region, and part is the work of keen Nordic Wikipedia editors who have written up their local scenes.

Two bar charts of bands per million people by country. Left, all bands: Estonia, Finland, Slovenia, Norway and Sweden lead. Right, metal bands: Finland 84.8, Sweden 56.2, Norway 55.5, Slovenia 44.1, the Netherlands 28.0, then Denmark, Austria and Germany
Bands and metal bands in Wikidata per million people, by country.

Where the women are

Women are 25.4% of musicians whose gender Wikidata records. By decade of birth, the share climbs from 8.1% before 1800 to about a fifth in the nineteenth century, stays there for musicians born up to the 1950s, and then rises to 42% for those born in the 1990s. But the kind of musician matters more than the decade: women are 46% of singers and 27% of songwriters, but 12% of composers, 11% of rappers, 9% of DJs and producers and 7% of conductors.

Left, a line chart of women's share of musicians by decade of birth, from 8 per cent before 1800 to about 20 per cent through the 1800s and early 1900s, then rising steeply to 42 per cent in the 1990s, with a dashed line for notable musicians rising above it. Right, bars by kind of musician: singers 46 per cent, songwriters 27, other musicians 20, instrumentalists 17, composers 12, rappers 11, DJs and producers 9, conductors 7
Women’s share of musicians, by decade of birth and by kind of musician.

A map of who keeps records

All of this rests on what Wikidata happens to know. It has a birth country for 99.8% of famous musicians but only 46% of those with one Wikipedia article or none, and a formation place for just 27% of its bands. Whole national library catalogues have been copied in for some countries, which is why Tallinn, Prague and Brno top the per-head list of birth cities. So the map is best read as the open record of music: rich where archives and enthusiasts have filled it in, thin where they have not.

Bar chart by number of sitelinks: musicians with a birth country rise from 46 per cent of those with 0 or 1 sitelinks to 100 per cent of those with 50 or more; bands with a formation place on the map rise from 18 per cent to 94 per cent
How often Wikidata knows where, by how famous a musician or band is.

How I did this

Queries to Wikidata through the QLever service gave every person with a musical occupation, with birthplace, birth date, gender and number of sitelinks, every musical group with its place and date of formation, and the genres of both. I placed each point in its present-day country with Natural Earth outlines, grouped points within 25 km of cities of 200,000 people or more, and grouped the 534 occupations into eight kinds of musician and the 3,743 genres into thirteen families by rules on their names. The lists are published with the data, so you can regroup them. Everything is in the paper, with the code and data on GitHub.

The usual caveats apply, and here they matter a lot. Wikidata is not a census of musicians. Its occupations are generous (the most linked “musicians” include Leonardo da Vinci, Goethe and Nietzsche, who all played or composed), it records gender mostly as a binary, genres for only 23% of musicians, and its coverage depends on which catalogues have been imported. Countries use today’s borders, so a composer born in Lviv in 1850 counts as Ukrainian.

Explore the interactive version
Read the paper
Data and code

Notes and sources

  • Wikidata, via QLever (qlever.cs.uni-freiburg.de), retrieved 2026. CC0.
  • Natural Earth countries, land and populated places, with population estimates. Public domain.
  • Paper: Hotham, T. (2026) Where the world’s music comes from: the birthplaces of 291,579 musicians and the home towns of bands in Wikidata. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23850287
  • I wrote the text, with drafting and editing assistance from Claude (Anthropic), which also helped prepare the analysis code. I reviewed and checked all text and results.

Tristan Hotham

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