The Geography of the Year in Music

It’s time for the annual best-of lists, so I thought you might enjoy this urbanist take on the year's best songs. It’s based on the recently released list of the year’s top singles from reviewers and critics at the music site Pitchfork. So yes, we're starting with a subjective assessment, one that is heavily skewed toward English language acts in the indie, alternative, and hip-hop genres. It's also admittedly one that's on occasion been mocked as out of touch or overly snobby. Still, it’s as useful a barometer of what’s hot at the leading edges of popular music as any. And for our purposes, it turns out to be quite amenable to locational analysis, too.

MPI alum Patrick Adler, now a doctoral student in urban planning at UCLA, used allmusic.com’s database and press coverage to assign a locational "base of operations" for every act and artist on Pitchfork’s list save one, a mysterious German group called "Tiger and Woods." Then he counted up the number of hits (or hit-making acts) per city. If an artist had two hits, they were counted twice. If there was a collaboration involving artists from different cities, their hit was divided between those cities.