Louisiana’s Favorite Artist Is…Kevin Gates?

Kevin Gates? Louisiana's Favorite Band/Artist? At least that's according to the Echo Nest, a music intelligence cooperative out of Somerville, Maine.

According to their website/blog:

The Echo Nest director of developer platform Paul Lamere has determined the recording artist that is most “distinctive” to music fans in any state — that is to say, their favorite artists, relative to the people in other states — and presented his findings in the map below.

Rhode Islanders listen to more Nirvana than people in other states do. Vermonters are, predictably, the biggest Phish Heads, while Oregonians listen to more Kurt Vile than people in other places. The list goes on, and it’s plenty fascinating.

Rather than being based on where artists are from (also interesting), the below chart is based on the real listening behavior of actual music fans. The Echo Nest knows enough about over 35 million songs by about 2.7 million artists to help music fans on 432 apps and services (and counting) find the perfect music for them at that moment. In the course of providing all of these personalized recommendations, we see detailed listening data for millions of anonymous listeners. We can extract all kinds of interesting things from that data about how musical taste varies in various groups of people, based on the real world.

If you'd like to dig a little deeper and see exactly how Kevin Gates became Louisiana's favorite musical artist, take a look at Echo Nest Director of Developer Platform Paul Lamere's Music Machinery blog, where he breaks down all of the data.

And just who the hell is Kevin Gates? Turns out he's a rapper from Baton Rouge. Find out more at his official website, or take a look at one of his videos here.

Louisiana's favorite band? Who picked this guy? I know Paul Lamere sure wasn't looking at my Spotify playlist when he made this call!