Seeing your favorite band live is made much easier by having the musical artist come to your hometown. But not all of us are so fortunate – for some, traveling to a larger city is the only chance to see a concert. I was curious to see how closely tour locations follow the distribution of the US population. In other words, if 12% of the US population is in California, do touring musicians play about 12% of their concerts in that state? Obviously, this will vary by artist, so I selected 11 who have toured multiple times in the US.

Using historical tour locations, I calculated, for each artist, the percentage of US concerts by state. I then subtracted from that the percentage of the US population that lives in each respective state. Using subtraction (rather than division) tends to highlight states with larger populations; this is intentional, as I was less interested in states with <1% of the population and only a handful of concerts played. None of the artists has played a public concert in all 50 states!

When this method yields a positive number, it suggests that the artist may overplay in that state. That is, people living in that state may have an easier time attending a concert by the artist. A negative number indicates that the artist underplays there. For each map, the states with the most extreme positive and negative values are marked with an “O” and a “U,” respectively. In doing the analysis, it was also clear that some artists are much more likely to tour globally, while others rarely play outside of the US. So I added the bar graph to represent those data.

Because I’ve used all available historical data from the source, some artists may have a bias towards their hometown or where they first started gaining popularity (e.g., DMB in VA). It’s also worth noting that musical styles may play a role, as Toby Keith and Kenny Chesney have strikingly similar maps.

Data source: http://www.songkick.com/