The Echo Nest Blog The World's Most Wanted Music Is Created by Icelanders & Islanders

The islands of Jamaica and the United Kingdom produce a disproportionate number of musical styles and artists, according to musical legend. The world of pop music would be missing huge pieces, the thinking goes, had these islands submerged before the invention of electricity.Taking this concept beyond mere anecdote and into the realm of data-based reality, The Echo Nest principal engineer and "data alchemist" Glenn McDonald says he "took The Echo Nest's ten thousand most up-and-coming songs by relatively unknown artists (a.k.a. our Discovery list), found the artists responsible for them, determined those artists' countries, counted the number of artists per country, and then prorated the counts by population to create a ranking of countries by proportional discovery share - and then I did the same again, ranking by hotness instead of discovery."What this means: You're about to see two lists consisting of countries that punch above their weight in terms of producing the artists who - this month - are captivating the world in two important ways.DiscoveryAs we said when we first announced The Echo Nest Discovery, our computers spend a lot of time scouring the web, figuring out what people are listening to and talking about. And then we do some math. Actually, we do a lot of math. Then we take the result of that math, and feed it into yet more math.When our system has finished processing all of this music and what people are saying about it, one of the many numbers that pops out is a Discovery score for every song in the universe. The point of this number is to identify songs that are heating up right now, but which aren't yet big hits, having been created by artists who are not yet established.According to The Echo Nest Discovery (listen on Spotify), the following countries spawned the most relatively unknown artists that have recorded songs that people are only just now getting excited about.Here's the list of countries from the above Discovery map. We've bolded the islands, and will explain why later:IcelandSwedenFinlandNorwayUnited KingdomDenmarkIrelandUnited StatesAustraliaNetherlandsNew ZealandCanadaJamaicaBelgiumAustriaGermanyFranceSwitzerlandPuerto RicoSpainPolandSlovakiaIsraelItalyGreeceSouth KoreaBrazilArgentinaChileMexicoRomaniaJapanRussiaSouth AfricaColombiaIndonesiaScandinavian countries claim the top four spots on our Discovery list, and five of the top ten. Perhaps there's something about being stuck indoors making music in the winter, in a place that is already quite cold, that is conducive to making music that other people want to discover - or at least that's what happened this year.Now, about those islands. About a quarter of all countries in the world are island nations, according to Dana Ott as cited by Wikipedia. Our Discovery list contains about 19 percent islands, meaning that island nations are actually slightly underrepresented, although they do rank fairly high in terms of producing music that is just now being discovered.Now, let's look at where some more popular music comes from."Hotttnesss"The Echo Nest's deep musical intelligence also knows which songs are getting the most buzz - not just how they're charting, or how many times they've been played, but how much people all over the world are talking about and sharing them. We call this buzz-measuring score "Hotttnesss" (listen on Spotify).Glenn also ranked the world's countries by the number of "hottt" artists they have right now in our list of the top 10K hottest songs, relative to their populations.Once again, we've bolded the island countries - and just for kicks, italicized countries that are on peninsulas or otherwise are bordered by large bodies of water (i.e. they have fewer direct neighbors):IcelandJamaicaPuerto RicoSwedenUnited KingdomGuadeloupeNorwayUnited StatesFinlandIrelandAustraliaBosnia and HerzegovinaNew ZealandSerbiaEstonia 16 CanadaCroatiaDenmarkNetherlandsBelgiumTurkeyFrancePanamaGermanyAustriaSpainItalyRomaniaHungaryAlbaniaPortugalGreeceSwitzerlandIsraelArgentinaMexicoDominican RepublicCzech RepublicColombiaCubaPolandBrazilChileJapanVenezuelaSouth KoreaMalaysiaGuatemalaPhilippinesSouth AfricaMoroccoThailandVietnamIranAlgeriaRussiaIndonesiaNigeriaPakistanIndiaIceland tops both lists. No other place in the world makes as much music that's being discovered and generating buzz as does this particular island nation.In fact, when it comes to making the "hotttnessst" music - the songs generating the most buzz, climbing the charts the fastest, and making their creators famous - island nations rule. Islands claimed the top three spots on the list, and six of the top ten. A full 60 percent of the top 20 are either islands or somewhat island-ish, in that they are peninsulas or largely water-bounded.Glenn's research confirms that the legend of Jamaica and the United Kingdom exerting disproportionate musical influence over the world are true. Even more, it shows that when it comes to interesting the rest of the world in one's music, it helps to be Scandinavian, an island-dweller, or ideally, both.