How does your music map work? Not too clear on how related artists are picked.

Also, I'm guessing that the nyt got some sort of special dataset from YouTube. Geo located streams are priveleged to the content owner, per the YouTube API.

It is all user driven. The map is based on what people enter at http://www.gnoosic.com.

This is an aside but I'm wondering if you have any recommendations for finding new music one may enjoy?

Frustrated with music recommendation services I built a ruby script this past weekend to scrape my favorite artist's last.fm pages and then iterate on each follower, compiling a list of their likes to sort of crowd-source music recommendations for myself.

This too resulted in failure, it seems that the problem is me, I'm far too picky.

I'd love to get your insight on any alternative strategies for finding new artists if your likes don't necessarily fit squarely inside genres.

I expect that the data is the same as what is found on the YouTube Artists site, which has music data for different geographic regions.

Go to https://artists.youtube.com/insights/location and click on "How is this calculated?".

Why is it that on some maps the artist is very far away from another, but when you click on that artist the original one appears much closer?

Is the scale relative? Is there any indicator how scaled up or down the relationships are?

It's a simulated annealing process that happens live in front of you.

Each artist has a desired distance to each other artist and is trying to get to a position that satisfies all these desired distances as good as possible.