Shazam has found a music twin for 5,000 of the world’s cities

A new project by the BBC based on data provided by Shazam has trawled the music discovery service to find which cities share the same taste in music.

The results are, well, interesting to say the least. Nuuk in Greenland, the world’s most northernmost capital shares a similar taste in tunes with Surabaya in Indonesia.

When I ran the data on London, a global city of more than eight million people, the site found Kaiapoi in New Zealand with a population of just 10,000 to have a similar interest in the below six tracks.

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The dataset also pulls out the most searched for songs in the local area. In the UK capital’s case, In2 by English three-piece WSTRN was the most searched for song by Shazam users. As it happens, it is also the most searched song in both Bournemouth and Abu Dhabi, so go figure.

Adele’s Hello was the world’s most searched for song in the dataset, turning up in Shazam’s top 10 in 2,578 of the 4,900 cities sampled. Although you might have thought a song played on YouTube nearly a billion times might have broken out of the “what’s this song, I’ve never heard it before” column of people’s music tastes.

Other fun facts from the study found a classical score by composer Aaron Copland went down a storm among citizens of Waycross, Georgia.

Overall, the study illustrates how deeply Western pop music penetrates local cultures where ever they are. Taylor Swift, for example, was among the highest searched artists in Bangladesh, China, Kazakhstan and Peru.

You can find out your city’s own musical twin here.

➤ Musical ‘twin cities’ emerge from data [BBC]