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New Jersey has an array of musical tastes

When you think about what songs are most played in New Jersey bars, the answers seem obvious.

"Born to Run" by Bruce Springsteen must be on there. Or perhaps "Summer Wind" by Frank Sinatra or "Livin' on a Prayer" by Bon Jovi.

As it turns out, you're more likely to hear Enrique Iglesias' "Bailando" where Bruce cut his teeth in Asbury Park. Hoboken prefers Taylor Swift's "Blank Space" to the Chairman of the Board. And it appears that, no matter where you go, Queen's "Fat Bottomed Girls" makes New Jersey's rocking world go round.

As more of the music people listen to goes to the cloud, so too are the jukeboxes. TouchTunes, which operates more than 1,300 electronic jukeboxes in New Jersey provided New Jersey Advance Media with data on the top 10 artists, songs and genres from their machines in 30 different Garden State zip codes. When analyzed, it gives a glimpse into what people are listening to when they have the choice at New Jersey bars and clubs and, what's more, how the Garden State is changing.

The data shows that New Jersey has vastly different tastes in music depending on where you are. Latin music reigns in many urban centers in North and Central New Jersey, where the Hispanic population has been booming for years. Down south, country music has a stronghold. The shore, meanwhile, prefers a healthy mix of rock and nostalgia, where Tommy Tutone's "867-5309" can share a list with the Rolling Stones' "Can't You Hear me Knockin'."

MAP:

Other areas, like Maplewood's 07040, have lists befitting their burgeoning diversity. Songs by Yo Gotti, Metallica, Taylor Swift and Kenny Chesney all fill out the top 10 songs in the area, one of the only zip codes where four genres of music are represented.

We chose zip codes from nearly every county (sorry Hunterdon, not enough data yet), each of which features data from multiple TouchTunes machines. Zip codes representing population centers, state pop culture touchstones (Bon Jovi's hometown of Sayreville, for example) or destination areas, giving us a representative slice of tunes from across the state.

When all 30 zip codes are taken together and scored, a varied top 20 emerges, which we've compiled into a Spotify playlist below.

The map below, meanwhile, shows the top 10 songs for all 30 zip codes we analyzed. A similar analysis of the top 10 artists will be presented tomorrow (hint: it's not as similar as you might think.)

To see the map in a full screen,

Stephen Stirling may be reached at sstirling@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @sstirling. Find him on Facebook.