This week I decided to do something a little different, resulting from my questions regarding the profitability of Asch's Folkways Records. I thought it might be beneficial to start doing a bit of market research to get a better picture of what's going on in market for music. I used a tool called SimplyMap to generate some tables and maps based on Census data from 2008 and 2011 which would hopefully start to give us a picture of American's music taste, and the potential size of the market for the lost music generation. As there wasn't a specific "Folk" music category, I decided the closest alternative option was Bluegrass, closely followed by traditional country. Defining the "folk" genre has been one of the problems I have continued to run into in articles and the book am I working through entitled
Rainbow Quest. Even folk artists themselves seem to have trouble identifying other folk artists, as each group seems to carry with them their own definition of what constitutes folk. For this reason, I decided to include both Bluegrass and Traditional Country in my initial data collection. All maps and tables created used numerical data rather than percentages to give a more accurate picture of where potential consumers are and how many of them exist.
The first map I generated was the number of people who listed Bluegrass as their favorite type of music in 2008. It is depicted below.
Then we have the map of Bluegrass top choice in 2011.
Though the differences in the maps isn't extremely noticeable, in the top 10 states there was an increase in people putting Bluegrass as their favorite choice of music, going from 6,857,697 in 2008 up to 6,928,561 in 2011. Also by looking at the maps, we can find folk genre hot spots. When we take out the high population states (California, Texas, Illinois, New York) we see that geographically, this genre of music is quite popular in middle America (belt states of Tennessee, North Carolina, Virginia and Kentucky) as well as seems to be gaining popularity out west in Arizona, Oregon and Washington.
Similarly for Traditional Country in 2008 we have the following map.
And for 2011 Traditional Country we have:
These maps appear very similar to Bluegrass, but when viewed closely, you can pick out some regional variance based on taste. In terms of which definition hits closer to Folk music in definition, I'd take Bluegrass as a better representative than Country but I feel that each are worth taking a look at.
I also have lots of other data to sift through so I'll probably dedicate another blog post to the numbers and my analysis as I sift through the information. The images above are just a starting point, and I do realize that the numerical data I can harvest from them will be more significant when talking about project scope.
I applaud your desire to look at some contemporary data. But I urge that you do this slowly and carefully. Below are a set of questions one might (should) ask as to what is being looked at.
ReplyDelete1. You have survey data about music preference. Is that really from the Census? I believe I completed a form for 2010 census and I don't recall anything about music preference (but then my memory is not reliable on this point). In any event, it really would be good to pinpoint the data source. You give 2008 data as if this is collected annually and then 2011 data.
2. The data you have speaks to contemporary demand for that genre of music. You then seem to be making an implicit assumption that folks who like contemporary music in the genre would also want to hear Smithsonian Folkways music in that genre, even if the music dates to the 1950s. In Rock music, there are contemporary stations on the radio, classic rock stations, and oldies stations. These presumably appeal to different audiences. So you should ask whether there is reason to believe there is overlap between the audiences or not.
(3) Do you have some model of where the demand should be high and where it should be low? For example, if taste for musical genre correlate with politics - country is conservative and folk is liberal, to get the stereotype out there, then you might do a comparison of maps to see if such correlation shows up.
(4) My sense is that aggregating at the State level, and perhaps even at the major metropolitan area level (SMSA) is to coarse an aggregation. Your maps are largely showing that states with high population have high demand. That doesn't tell you much.