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Writing Assignment: Pop Music and American Culture
Diffusion occurs when ideas and beliefs spread from a cultural hearth to other areas via some
process of adoption. For this course, we will concentrate on four types of diffusion: relocation,
hierarchical, contagious, and stimulus diffusion. For this assignment you are going to use Spotify
Global Charts to analyze the Top 50 lists in 10 countries to identify characteristics of music,
hearths, and types of diffusion. You will be responsible for completing the chart and answering
the questions. Your submission will be digital and it needs to be uploaded as either a Microsoft
Word document, or a PDF. Any other file type will receive a 0.
Data Collection
First, let’s collect some data to analyze. If you are not familiar with Spotify, it is musicstreaming software designed to customize the experience of music to your habits. The company
buys licensing options from artists, so users can stream music from the artists. In turn, this not
only allows artists, or whomever holds the rights to the song, to make small profits from songs
(between $0.006 to $0.0084 per play). For example, on December 24, 2018, “All I want for
Christmas is You”, by Mariah Carey broke the record for number of plays in a single day with
almost 11 million plays for a grand total of about $92,000. For many artists, the exposure of
being featured on “Discover Weekly”—a customized playlist that is presented every Monday
based on recently played music—is a great opportunity to expand their potential market. Not
only this, but Spotify is a valuable source of information on music trends.
To begin, open Spotify and go to Search, then click on Charts.
In charts, go to Weekly Song Charts and select Show All.
The countries you will need to find are: USA, Mexico, Brazil, UK, Germany, South Africa,
India, Japan, Indonesia, and Australia. Don’t panic at the number of songs in these lists, because
you only need to look at the singers of the top 10 in each list and identify where they are born.
You do not need to listen to the entire song—just a few seconds to get an idea of what the song is
about. When a song has more than one artist, you will record the birthplace of the first artist and
none of the other artists on the song. We are making this decision, because we will assume there
was some legal arrangement that listed that artist first which makes them the most important
artist in the collaboration. If the song is sung by a band, then you will record the country where
the band formed. Do this for each country and keep track of the number of countries in the table
below.
The above photo is a screenshot taken on June 8, 2020, when ROCKSTAR was the most played
song by American Spotify users. The song is a collaboration between DaBaby and Roddy Ricch,
but we want to make a single entry in the table, so we will look at the birthplace of DaBaby and
record that. He was born in the US, so he would be counted as an American artist. Moving on to
the other artists in the top 10 on this list, we see that StaySolidRocky, Lil Mosey, THE SCOTTS,
Roddy Ricch, Lady Gaga, Megan Thee Stallion, and Jack Harlow are all Americans, while The
Weeknd and Drake are Canadian. In our table, we would have 8 artists in the American column,
2 artists in the Canadian column and 0 artists in any other column that we need to add. Below is
an example of how that would be entered.
Countries
Canada
Germany
USA
USA List
2
0
8
As you move through the lists, you will need to adjust the number of columns for countries of
birth on the x-axis of Figure 1. This means that not every country list will have entries for
country of birth, so put a 0 in that cell (see Germany in the above example). When you have
looked at the birthplace of every artist, then calculate the totals for each axis.
Figure 1. Diffusion of Music Around the World
Country
of Top
Country
of birth
(You
50 List ↓ may
need to
add more
columns)
→
Total
USA
10
Mexico
10
Brazil
10
Germany
10
UK
10
South Africa
10
India
10
Japan
10
Indonesia
10
Australia
10
Total
100
Questions
1. Now that you have looked at 100 songs, it is time to analyze the data. Identify at least two
musical characteristics you think are common between the lists and explain why you
think they are diffusing to other countries? For example, is there a certain rhythm, or
unique instrument that is common to several songs?
2. Using Figure 1. to support your ideas, please identify cultural hearths (you may find
there’s more than one) for global pop music and explain why they appear where they do.
3. You may notice that several artists appear on more than one list and that those artists are
probably from areas you identified in question 2. Identify the type of diffusion you think
is responsible for the spread of music outside these hearths, and explain whether or not
the types of diffusion adequately explain this pattern?
4. Finally, because this is a geography course, we need to talk about spatial patterns that you
have discovered in your data analysis. You have already discussed which
regions/continents of the world have the most influence on global pop music, so which
areas have the least influence? Why do you think that is? Are these ten countries a good
representation of global music? Explain your answers.
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