Objective of the Study
In what relationship are the most famous music styles? Which of them appear simultaneously in preferences of people and which do not? What style is the most popular one among young people?
Data Collection
Data source: Data were collected from a database of the music portal Last.fm.
Sample selection: About 149 000 user names were selected with the snowball method. 3174 of them were randomly selected and detailed information about their music profile was found out. The result was a list of 24 778 musicians with their music profile. If a musician was not categorized by any user into any monitored style, he was excluded from the analysis.
Variables: 20 most frequent music styles were analyzed, rock, pop, alternative, metal, electronic, punk, jazz, indie, hip-hop, rap, classical, ska, techno, country, rnb, house, blues. For each user the popularity of the given style was calculated considering the frequency at which he used to listen to musicians of the given music style.
The result of data collection is a matrix where rows represent users and columns represent music styles. Values of single cells express how much the given user likes the given style.
Sociomap and the popularity of individual music styles
The position of single music styles on the Sociomap represents their proximity according to users’ preferences. Styles that are close to each other are usually preferred together. If somebody likes punk, he will probably also like the style indie (it is the closest one). On the other hand, styles that are far from each other do not appear simultaneously in users’ preferences. If somebody likes metal, he probably will not like indie or punk.
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The level on the Sociomap shows the popularity of the given music style. The most popular style is alternative, which is the highest point on the map (red color), the least popular is then the music style metal (blue color).
The relief of the map was created the following way: Each user is situated on the map according to his preferences of single styles. If he prefers one style, he will be placed under this style. If his preferences are split into more styles, he is placed in between all of them. For example a user who prefers rock and pop will be placed between these styles. Where many such users were placed there is a high hill (red color) formed. Where few or no users were placed, there is a plain (blue color).