Mapping Music: Part 2
16/01/09
After getting slightly distracted with the makeover I gave this blog last week and getting stuck into other work this week, I managed to spend a few hours this morning working on my Google Maps and Last FM mashup. Not to much to report, although I did managed to calculate a chart for the most popular artist across Europe. Initially I was slightly disappointed with the figures perhaps I was expecting plays in the millions. After some calculator consultation the total number of top ten plays at 3mins estimates at 2.53 years worth of music. Impressive.
One issue that has risen is the high number of requests made to the Last FM api in order to get the country specific data. The choice was between using the 27 European Unions member states, or the 49 countries which exist geographically within Europe. For the moment I’ve gone with the later, and ignored the 1.4mb of requests needed to complete this, but due to the Last FM api there is no other way of fetching the relevant data. A consequence of this is that Europe looks far more busy and the chart below is more populated.
The above image shows the chart generated after each of the European Countries data has been collated. I was slightly frustrated that the feed from the Last FM api isn’t live or updated on daily basis, instead I believe its updated weekly. I have uploaded the above build of Mapping Music and can be viewed here.
Next
- Individual country charts
- Comparison charts
- Improve the interface
- Look into a chart timeline.