ARTIST REQUIREMENTS
Each of the 28 artists selected for this project had to meet the following criteria for this project:
Musician has had two or more singles appear on the Billboard Hot 100 or UK Singles Chart since 1 January 2005.
Musician cannot have appeared on the Billboard Hot 100 or UK Singles Chart in a previous group or in a separate solo project.
Musician cannot have a previously established mainstream career in other popular entertainment industries such as television, film, etc.
Musician must have a touring history with at least 15 performance dates for quality analysis that begins at least one year before peak charting position of first song appearance on the Billboard Hot 100 or UK Singles Chart.
DATA TIMELINE AND SPECIFICATIONS
The data used in this project runs from the earliest recorded date for each individual artist up until 31 July 2015. The data also includes performances from any of the artists under a previous stage name so long as the material performed is consistent with their current career.
DATA COLLECTION
14 musicians from the US and 14 from the UK were selected for this project. Data collection began by downloading the information from each artist’s Past Events section on SongKick via import.io. This data was then supplemented by a variety of additional sources detailed in the Software and Data Credits section of this website. All data was compiled into an Microsoft Excel sheet where initial clean-up was done. This included eliminating unnecessary columns, basic editing of event and festival names, and adding on a column that attaches the artist’s name to each performance date. The total number of unique performances in the dataset totaled to 11,379.
After some basic clean-up, the files were then uploaded to OpenRefine for more detailed and in-depth editing. This portion is what the vast majority of time spent on the project went into. As previously stated, a wide variety of sources were used in determining the data outlined below, including venue/event websites, event posters, fan Wikia pages, and online publications. These are detailed in the Software and Data Credits section of this website.
A column was added to distinguish headline, co-headline, opening act, and festival/special event shows from each other. More recent data was relatively easy to find through simple Google searches, but it became increasingly difficult to find these details for performances before 2008 and for ones that took place in small-sized venues.
Venue names and addresses were cleaned up and corrected. A significant number of small capacity venues, especially bars, had closed down or moved, and numerous spaces of all sizes had been renamed. Festivals were particularly hard to find locations for because their posters and websites generally only list the city and country the event will be held it. Many such events are also held in remote fields, making it very difficult to even locate a nearby street name for.
Dates were then streamlined into a single format. Festivals and special events, which constituted about 22% (~2,500 performances) of the data, gave a range of dates rather than one specific one. This required further searches to pin down the artist’s performance at that particular event to the very date it happened. Though this data originally listed the date, month, and year of each performance, it was simplified to only month and year when the maps were created.
Next, each location was geocoded in order to be mapped. Several online resources were used before settling on the Excel Geocoding Tool, which is both efficient and free. Locations that this tool was not initially able to find were run through Find Latitude and Longitude. After this, the data was finally ready to be used to create the maps and to observe any possible patterns.
MAP CREATION
Maps were chosen as the best method of display for this project because they allow viewers to see for themselves where both high and low concentrations of performances occur all over the world. This also allows for the creation of thematic maps that focus on specific characteristics of the artists, such as gender and race. The maps were creating using Tableau Public. Compared to the manual-heavy process detailed above, it was quite the change of pace to simply drag and drop elements of the Excel sheet to manipulate the map. Tableau was not only extremely user-friendly, but allowed for the creation of visually appealing maps that would appropriately display the patterns and specific information about each performance date.
WEBSITE CREATION
This website was created in order for viewers to have one space where they can view the maps, understand the work behind the project, and analyze the conclusions. Having as website as a deliverable makes all the content of the project easy to navigate and provides a more holistic narrative for the project.