Questions
Who is on the map?
Musicians that Wikipedia files under a New York City neighborhood, in its categories of people from each neighborhood. Someone counts as a musician when the one line Wikidata says about them leads with a music role: “rapper and actor” is in, “actress and singer” is not.
The list is rebuilt from Wikipedia and Wikidata every week, and the date of the last rebuild is in the credits. A few things are kept by hand on top of it: people the music rule gets wrong either way, each with the reason written down, and the names people know some artists by.
Does it mean they are from there?
Not always. Wikipedia files people under a neighborhood for any tie: growing up there, being born in its hospital, or arriving as an adult. So the map shows who is tied to a neighborhood, not who is from it.
Each card says where the artist was born. For the best known, it also says how they are tied to New York, read from their Wikipedia article, with a link to it.
Who names a neighborhood?
From afar each neighborhood shows one name: its best-known artist, as long as their tie to New York is more than a birth or a short stay. An artist with a place of their own on record, such as a childhood home, is named at that place instead. Only about the 200 best known are named at all, so a neighborhood can show none.
Someone who was only born in New York, passed through, or left before they were fourteen never names a neighborhood, and goes to the back of its pile of faces. They are still on its list and in its count. Tupac Shakur, whose family left New York when he was thirteen, is on East Harlem’s list; Suzanne Vega names it.
How is “best known” decided?
The aim is how much people in the US and the UK listen to an artist, but nobody publishes that: Spotify never offered listener counts. So the order comes from the two open sources that come closest, multiplied together.
One is how many people have played the artist in ListenBrainz’s open listening data. The other is how often their English Wikipedia article is read in a typical month of the last three years, which counts for more because it is current.
Why are most faces piled on their neighborhood?
The map never makes up a location. An artist has a spot of their own only when a real place is on record: a home published by a reputable source, which the card links to; a housing development whose Wikipedia article lists them; or a street the City named for them.
Everyone else is shown with their neighborhood, in its pile. Schools are on the map with the artists who went to them, but never move anyone.
What does the map never show?
The building a living person lives or lived in. They are placed at a block or a large housing development at most, and a block is rounded to about 100 meters. A home found by hand is where someone grew up or used to live, never where they live now, and never one their family still lives in.
Living children. No living artist under eighteen is on the map: where their birth year is on record, they appear from the year after they turn eighteen.
Why do some artists have no picture?
The map uses only photographs that are free to reuse, mostly from Wikimedia Commons, and each card links to the photo’s page, which says who took it and under what license. Many artists have none, and a picture Wikipedia shows under “fair use” is not one this site may use. Their initials stand in.
Why is there no Spotify player for some?
The player needs the artist’s Spotify page, which comes from Wikidata or MusicBrainz. When neither has it, the card links to a Spotify search for the name instead.
What does “Put on” a neighborhood play?
Its artists one after another, in Spotify’s own player, the same one an artist’s card has: one song each, best known first or oldest first, of those with a Spotify page. It stops at the end of the list. Opening an artist’s card pauses it, and playing either player stops the other, so that the two never play over each other.
Signed in to Spotify in the same browser, you hear whole songs; otherwise Spotify plays its 30-second previews. Some browsers, Safari among them, let a player start only when it is pressed: there each artist waits for a press of the player’s own play button.
Why are bands missing?
The map is of people. Wikipedia’s categories list people, and a band is not tied to a neighborhood the way a person is. Its members are on the map one by one, where Wikipedia files them: Joey Ramone in Forest Hills, Marky Ramone in Brooklyn Heights.
Can I see it as a list?
Every artist and every neighborhood also has a page of its own, with the same facts as the map: browse the neighborhoods, the genres or all the artists from A to Z. An artist’s page makes images of them on the map, square or tall, to post anywhere.
Something is wrong. How do I fix it?
When an artist’s card offers “Suggest a correction”, send it with a link to where the right answer is published. A person checks the source before anything on the map changes.
Most of the map comes from Wikipedia, so a correction made there reaches the map at the next weekly rebuild.
What does the site keep about me?
No cookies and no account. Cloudflare Web Analytics counts visits without cookies and without identifying you.
A correction you send is kept for the owner to review: which artist, what should change and your link, nothing more. It waits with Cloudflare, which hosts the site, until it is filed as an issue in the site’s private repository on GitHub, usually within six hours, and it waits 30 days at most; from then on it is kept only as that issue. Cloudflare’s logs keep the request that carried it for 3 days.
The privacy page says more, with what the services the map draws on can see. The terms say whose content the map shows.