BoingBoing pointed me to an interesting little tool over at Gracenote. Once known as CDDB, Gracenote provides the service a lot of music software uses to obtain album information. When you insert a disc into the CD or DVD drive on your computer, the software may very well connect to Gracenote to populate the title, track and artist information and the like.
Gracenote’s site now has a map showing the most popular albums and artists for various countries and the states of the U.S. based on the inquiries to its database. As it’s based only on those queries and you generally wouldn’t need to obtain the info for a particular CD more than once, it’s certainly not the most accurate assessment of popularity. Still, it is interesting. As of the time I checked, here were South Dakota’s top 10 artists:
- Carrie Underwood
- The Beatles
- Rascal Flatts
- Garth Brooks
- Pearl Jam
- AC/DC
- Metallica
- Linkin Park
- Nickelback
- George Strait
Six other artists, including Seether and Kanye West, were on the top 10 album list but not among the top 10 artists. Only Underwood (with two albums in the top 10), Rascal Flatts and Nickelback appeared on both lists. Overall, it seems there’s a few head bangin’ metal cowboys in the state.
But all the knowledge in the world is of no use to fools
Title Track, Eagles, Long Road Out of Eden
