Chris Herring

Mapping music is the title of a little project I started over the weekend, hopefully over the forthcoming days I shall be blogging on its development. The idea is to use information gathered via Last FM and the visualize this geographically for Europe using the Google Maps API for flash. In doing so I’ll try to calculate the most popular artists across Europe and have fun learning something new.

Structure
At the moment I have an xml file which contains a list of countries within the Europe, then for each country I have attributed a latitude and longitude value. This is represented in the image below with a blue dot. It is easy to notice some of the dots are not in the centre of the countries, a by product of Batch Geocoder which is rather good.

In order to collate the information from Last FM various API requests are made relating to each Country. On the edge of the image below, I have quickly displayed each Country and its most popular artist.

Next
- Add an interface of some sort
- Figure out the most popular artist in Europe.