Wikidata, the open database behind Wikipedia, knows 478,552 musicians, singers, composers, rappers and DJs, and 115,219 bands, choirs and orchestras. This is where they were born and where the bands began: Vienna's composers and Nashville's country singers, Kingston's reggae, Seoul's K-pop and the black metal of Oslo and Bergen, decade by decade.
Every musician was born somewhere, and every band started somewhere. Put 312,913 of those places on one map and the history of music appears in the shape of the world: the courts and conservatories of central Europe, the port cities of the Atlantic, the American South, Kingston, Rio, Tokyo and Seoul. Some music is everywhere. Some, like country, reggae, tango or K-pop, has a home town.
It is also a map of who has been written down. Wikidata knows where 99.8% of famous musicians were born, but only 46% of those with one Wikipedia article or none, and it knows where just 26% of its bands were formed. So read it as the open record of music, not a census. Switch between musicians and bands, choose a kind of musician or a family of genres, drag the decade slider (decade of birth, or of formation for bands), and click a hexagon for the people and bands from there, best known first.
Hexagons: musicians born, or bands formed, inside each hexagon, under the filters above; zoom in for single places (circles). Decade: decade of birth for musicians, of formation for bands. Kinds of musician come from Wikidata occupations, genres from Wikidata genres, each grouped into a few families (lists in the data folder); one person can be in several. People and bands whose place has no coordinates are not on the map but count in the charts. Source: Wikidata (CC0). Outlines and city names: Natural Earth. Base map tiles © Esri.
Group every birthplace within 25 km of a city of 200,000 people or more, so that Brooklyn counts with New York and Hollywood with Los Angeles, and New York comes first with 6,124 musicians, then London (4,627), Paris (4,466) and Vienna (4,102). Taken as a single Wikidata place, Vienna is the most common birthplace of all (3,784). Tokyo (3,281) is the first city outside Europe and the Americas.
Musicians born in each city, and bands formed there
Places within 25 km of a Natural Earth city of 200,000 or more. Per head: per 100,000 people living there today, cities with 150+ musicians or 60+ bands. Hover a bar.
Per head the old capitals of central Europe pull away. Vienna has 170.9 musicians in Wikidata for every 100,000 people who live there now, Prague 246.1, against New York's 32.2 and Tokyo's 9.2. The very top of the per-head list, Tallinn (253.5), Prague and Brno, says as much about national libraries as about music: Estonian and Czech catalogues of composers and performers have been copied into Wikidata in bulk.
Bands are a different map. Los Angeles is where most bands in Wikidata were formed (1,454), ahead of New York (1,380) and London (1,023), then San Francisco and Seattle. Per head, the band towns are Ljubljana, Bergen, Malmö and Oslo, with Liverpool and Nashville not far behind.
Take composers born before 1900 and 88% of them were born in Europe, led by Vienna (850) and Paris (829), then London, Prague, Berlin, Naples and Barcelona. Take pop, rock and metal musicians born since 1940 and Europe's share falls to 48%: London (788) leads, then New York and Los Angeles, with Tokyo, Stockholm and Jakarta in the top ten.
Where each kind of musician was born
Share born on each continent, musicians with a birth country, all decades. One person can count in several rows.
Composers before 1900, pop and rock since 1940
Top city areas for composers born before 1900 (26,083 on the map), and for pop, rock and metal musicians born in 1940 or later (24,811).
Most genres are everywhere, but some have a capital. Of the country music acts on the map, the most were born or formed in Nashville (118), and Nashville's share of its own acts that play country is 13.0 times the world average. Kingston has 23% of all reggae acts, Seoul 52% of K-pop, Rio de Janeiro 57% of samba, Buenos Aires 52% of tango and Lisbon 49% of fado. Black metal's capital is Oslo (38 acts), with Bergen second (20); grunge's is Seattle; grime's is London.
The home town of each genre
The city area with most acts (musicians born and bands formed) tagged with each genre in Wikidata, and its share of all such acts on the map. Click a row to see the genre's family on the map.
The location quotient tells a similar story from the other side: how much more common a family of genres is among a city's acts than among all acts. Kingston's acts are 35.4 times as likely to be in reggae and its relatives as the world's, Nashville's 13.0 times as likely to be country, New Orleans's 4.5 times as likely to be jazz. Detroit stands out for soul and R&B (3.8), Atlanta for hip hop (4.8).
Where each family of genres is most concentrated
Location quotient: the family's share of a city's genre-tagged acts divided by its share worldwide. Cities with 25+ acts in the family and 40+ tagged acts. Choose a family.
Wikidata has 115,219 musical groups. It knows the country of 78% of them, but the town where they formed for only 27%, so the band map is thinner than the musicians' map, and it is young: 96% of groups with a known start were formed in 1960 or later, with most in the 2000s. The United States accounts for 23% of bands with a country, against 14% of musicians.
Per head, the Nordic countries are the band countries. Finland has 553.8 bands in Wikidata per million people, Norway 376.4 and Sweden 266.2. For metal the gap is wider: 84.8 metal bands per million in Finland, 56.2 in Sweden and 55.5 in Norway, against 12.3 in Germany and 6.7 in the United States. Some of that is real, and some is the work of keen Nordic Wikipedia editors.
Bands per million people
By the country where the band was formed or comes from, countries of a million people or more with 100+ bands (30+ for metal).
Sort musicians by the decade they were born in and the map moves. Of musicians born before 1900, 87% were born in Europe and 2.3% in Asia. Of those born since 1970, Europe's share is 49% and Asia's 23%. Germany falls from 18.6% to 8.2%, while Japan rises from 0.3% to 6.1% and South Korea from almost nothing to 3.4%.
Where musicians were born, by decade of birth
Share of musicians with a birth country, by continent. Before 1800 pooled; decades after the 2000s left out (too few). Hover for numbers.
Rising and falling birth countries
Share of each decade's musicians born in each country, from the 1800s.
Women are 25.4% of musicians whose gender Wikidata records. Of those born before 1800 they are 8.1%; through the nineteenth century the share climbs to about a fifth, and it stays there for musicians born between 1900 and the 1950s. Then it rises again: 26% for musicians born in the 1970s, 37% in the 1980s and 42% in the 1990s.
Women's share of musicians, by decade of birth
Musicians whose gender Wikidata records (96% of all). Notable: 20+ sitelinks. Decades with fewer than 300 musicians left out.
It depends enormously on the kind of musician. Women are 46% of singers, but 12% of composers, 11% of rappers, 9% of DJs and producers and 7.2% of conductors. Among genres, East Asian pop is the only family where women are a majority (54%); metal is the most male (9.0%).
Women's share by kind of musician and by genre
All decades. Hover for numbers.
The United States is the birth country of 42,298 musicians, 14% of everyone with a birth country, then Germany (31,200), the United Kingdom (14,250), Italy, France and Japan. The Czech Republic (12,072) is seventh, ahead of Spain and Russia. Among notable musicians the American share more than doubles, to 34%, and the United Kingdom is second (10%).
Musicians by country of birth
Present-day borders. Notable: 20+ sitelinks (10,946 musicians). Hover a bar for the share of women.
Among British cities, Liverpool comes first per head for both musicians (66.1 per 100,000 people living there now) and bands (23.1), ahead of London (54.0 and 11.9). Manchester has formed 212 bands to Liverpool's 187, but from a larger area, and Sheffield, for all its synth-pop, has the lowest rates of the big cities here.
British and Irish cities
Musicians born and bands formed within 25 km, and per 100,000 present-day residents. Click a row to see it on the map.
Notable musicians almost always have a birthplace in Wikidata (99.8%). For the 291,514 musicians with one sitelink or none, 61% of all, it is 46%. Bands fare worse: a formation place is recorded for 87% of notable bands and 18% of those with one sitelink or none. Many entries came in bulk from library catalogues and music databases, which are richer for some countries (Czech, Estonian, German, Austrian) than for others, and for classical music than for popular music in much of Africa and Asia.
How often Wikidata knows where
Musicians with a birth country, and bands with a formation place on the map, by number of sitelinks.
Wikidata knows where 4,102 musicians from Vienna were born, and where 128 Afrobeats acts come from.
Musicians. One query through QLever returned every Wikidata human with an occupation that is musician or any of its subclasses (534 occupations appear, from composer and singer to organist, rapper, kobzar and bertsolari), with their birthplace, its coordinates and country, date of birth, gender and number of sitelinks: 818,669 rows for 478,552 people, matching a separate count of the same set. I grouped the occupations into eight families and kept every family a person belongs to: 160,553 people are in more than one. 63,026 have no English label in the extract and are shown by their Wikidata number.
Bands. A second query returned every musical group, from rock bands and idol groups to choirs and orchestras (4,273 of the 115,219 are choirs, orchestras or ensembles, which a filter separates), with its location of formation, start and end dates, country of origin and sitelinks. A band's country is that of its formation place, else its country of origin.
Places. A birth or formation country is the present-day country the point falls in (Natural Earth); for musicians it agrees with the place's Wikidata country 99% of the time. City areas group points within 25 km of a Natural Earth city of 200,000 people or more (64% of musicians' points), and per-head figures divide by that city's present population: a rough guide, since most of these musicians were born when cities were smaller.
Genres. Wikidata gives a genre for 23% of musicians and 56% of bands. I grouped the 3,743 genres used into thirteen families by rules on their names (the full list is in the data). Genre shares are among tagged acts only.
What this is not. It is not a census of musicians, nor a ranking of musical nations. Coverage is uneven between countries, between genres and between famous and obscure musicians. Occupations are generous: the most linked "musicians" include Leonardo da Vinci, Goethe, Martin Luther and Nietzsche, all of whom played or composed, alongside Michael Jackson, Mozart and Beethoven. Gender is as recorded, mostly as a binary (685 people have another gender recorded), and borders are today's.