Crawley – Welcome to Music Town, UK

The useful part

My home town of Crawley is apparently the undisputed heavyweight champion of British music. When the interactive map's results are normalized by population, Crawley appears as the largest circle on the map, giving it the highest Spotify-listener footprint per resident of any UK urban area in the explorer. Explorer is an interactive exploration of the geographical origins and global popularity of British bands.

How it works

• Using the map, you can search for individual bands or places, explore where artists were formed, compare Spotify monthly listeners and followers, and switch between raw totals and results normalized by the...
• Which is how Crawley ends up looking like Britain's musical superpower.
• The population-normalized view is where things become particularly interesting.
• Simply counting Spotify listeners naturally gives the biggest cities a huge advantage.
• Divide a city's musical reach by its population and suddenly smaller places can start punching far above their weight.

What to take from it

The fascinating thing about the UK Music Cities Explorer is that the answ...

Details worth keeping

Not bad for a small town in the south of England. London has a lot more potential musicians than Crawley.