Where the World's Music Comes From: The Birthplaces of Musicians and the Home Towns of Bands in Wikidata, by City, Genre, Decade and Gender

Where are musicians born, and where do bands begin? I use Wikidata, the open knowledge base behind Wikipedia, to map everyone it records with an occupation that is musician or any of its subclasses (478,552 people) and every musical group (115,219). 291,579 musicians (61%) have a birth country and 283,424 a birthplace with coordinates; 29,489 groups have a place of formation with coordinates. Grouping places into city areas, New York (6,124 musicians), London (4,627), Paris (4,466) and Vienna (4,102) lead for births, and Los Angeles (1,454), New York and London for bands. Composers born before 1900 were 88% European, pop, rock and metal musicians born since 1940 only 48%. Many genres have a clear home town: Kingston holds 23% of reggae acts, Seoul 52% of K-pop acts, Rio de Janeiro 57% of samba acts, and Nashville's acts are 13.0 times as likely as the world's to be country. Finland has 84.8 metal bands per million people. Women are 25.4% of musicians with a recorded gender, rising from 8.1% of those born before 1800 to 41.9% of those born in the 1990s, with large differences by kind of musician. Coverage is very uneven: a birth country is recorded for 99.8% of notable musicians but 46% of those with at most one sitelink, and a formation place for 27% of groups. The atlas maps the open record of music, not every musician. Interactive version: https://maps.tristanhotham.com/music-birthplaces/. Data and code: https://github.com/Tristan-Hotham/music-birthplaces. Blog post: https://blog.tristanhotham.com/2026/10/31/music-birthplaces/.