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Cities as ecological niches

To understand how the relationship between musicians’ unconventionality and popularity varies across cities, we built in interactive visualization tool.  It can be accessed here. 

The tool allows a user to compare cities in terms of the musicians that are located there.  Across cities, there tends to be an “inverted U” pattern, whereby musicians that are “too conventional” or “too unconventional” are penalized, while bands that exist in the “sweet spot” between the two are relatively popular.  However, the shape of this relationship varies depending on the city.