Each dot is one of the top 1,000 U.S. artists by streaming in 2024. Horizontal position shows whether an artist’s listening skews toward Democratic- or Republican-leaning regions; vertical position shows overall popularity. Hover a dot, search an artist, or toggle genres. Best viewed on a desktop.
The Political Leaning Index (horizontal axis) measures how an artist’s listening is distributed across regions that voted Democratic or Republican in the 2020 presidential election. Values near zero mean an artist is roughly equally popular in Democratic- and Republican-leaning areas; the farther a dot sits to the left or right, the more geographically concentrated that artist’s audience is on one side of the political map. Popularity (vertical axis, log scale) is the artist’s 2024 streaming share, with higher values indicating greater popularity.
The map summarizes where artists are streamed geographically, not the political ideology of individual listeners or artists. For example, an artist who is especially popular in the South will appear more Republican-leaning on the map, even if a majority of their individual listeners in those places may have voted Democratic.
Click any artist, or search for one, to trace how their streaming audience shifted across Democratic- and Republican-leaning regions year by year from 2018 to 2024.
Regions are Designated Market Areas (DMAs). For each DMA we computed the 2020 Trump-minus-Biden vote-share gap, then linked each artist’s DMA-level streaming share to those gaps, following the approach in Liaukonytė, Tuchman & Zhu (2023) (ungated) and the accompanying research note.
The authors thank Tomas Keršulis for excellent research assistance in developing this tool.