Identify at least two musical characteristics you think are common between the lists and explain why you think they are diffusing to other countries?

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Writing Assignment: Pop Music and American Culture

Diffusion occurs when ideas and beliefs spread from a cultural hearth to other areas via some process of adoption. For this course, we will concentrate on four types of diffusion: relocation, hierarchical, contagious, and stimulus diffusion. For this assignment you are going to use Spotify Global Charts to analyze the Top 50 lists in 10 countries to identify characteristics of music, hearths, and types of diffusion. You will be responsible for completing the chart and answering the questions. Your submission will be digital and it needs to be uploaded as either a Microsoft Word document, or a PDF. Any other file type will receive a 0.

Data Collection

First, let’s collect some data to analyze. If you are not familiar with Spotify, it is music-streaming software designed to customize the experience of music to your habits. The company buys licensing options from artists, so users can stream music from the artists. In turn, this not only allows artists, or whomever holds the rights to the song, to make small profits from songs (between $0.006 to $0.0084 per play). For example, on December 24, 2018, “All I want for Christmas is You”, by Mariah Carey broke the record for number of plays in a single day with almost 11 million plays for a grand total of about $92,000. For many artists, the exposure of being featured on “Discover Weekly”—a customized playlist that is presented every Monday based on recently played music—is a great opportunity to expand their potential market. Not only this, but Spotify is a valuable source of information on music trends.

To begin, open Spotify and go to Search, then click on Charts.

In charts, go to Weekly Song Charts and select Show All.

The countries you will need to find are: USA, Mexico, Brazil, UK, Germany, South Africa, India, Japan, Indonesia, and Australia. Don’t panic at the number of songs in these lists, because you only need to look at the singers of the top 10 in each list and identify where they are born. You do not need to listen to the entire song—just a few seconds to get an idea of what the song is about. When a song has more than one artist, you will record the birthplace of the first artist and none of the other artists on the song. We are making this decision, because we will assume there was some legal arrangement that listed that artist first which makes them the most important artist in the collaboration. If the song is sung by a band, then you will record the country where the band formed. Do this for each country and keep track of the number of countries in the table below.

The above photo is a screenshot taken on June 8, 2020, when ROCKSTAR was the most played song by American Spotify users. The song is a collaboration between DaBaby and Roddy Ricch, but we want to make a single entry in the table, so we will look at the birthplace of DaBaby and record that. He was born in the US, so he would be counted as an American artist. Moving on to the other artists in the top 10 on this list, we see that StaySolidRocky, Lil Mosey, THE SCOTTS, Roddy Ricch, Lady Gaga, Megan Thee Stallion, and Jack Harlow are all Americans, while The Weeknd and Drake are Canadian. In our table, we would have 8 artists in the American column, 2 artists in the Canadian column and 0 artists in any other column that we need to add. Below is an example of how that would be entered.

As you move through the lists, you will need to adjust the number of columns for countries of birth on the x-axis of Figure 1. This means that not every country list will have entries for country of birth, so put a 0 in that cell (see Germany in the above example). When you have looked at the birthplace of every artist, then calculate the totals for each axis.

Figure 1. Diffusion of Music Around the World

Questions

Now that you have looked at 100 songs, it is time to analyze the data. Identify at least two musical characteristics you think are common between the lists and explain why you think they are diffusing to other countries? For example, is there a certain rhythm, or unique instrument that is common to several songs?

Using Figure 1. to support your ideas, please identify cultural hearths (you may find there’s more than one) for global pop music and explain why they appear where they do.

You may notice that several artists appear on more than one list and that those artists are probably from areas you identified in question 2. Identify the type of diffusion you think is responsible for the spread of music outside these hearths, and explain whether or not the types of diffusion adequately explain this pattern?

Finally, because this is a geography course, we need to talk about spatial patterns that you have discovered in your data analysis. You have already discussed which regions/continents of the world have the most influence on global pop music, so which areas have the least influence? Why do you think that is? Are these ten countries a good representation of global music? Explain your answers.

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