Spotimap Pins Songs About Cities On Playable Map
Guest Post by Eliot Van Buskirk
If he ever got out of here, Bob Seger was going to Kathmandu. Katy Perry woke up broke in Las Vegas. Paul Simon followed the river down the highway through the cradle of the Civil War to Graceland, Memphis Tennessee.You can find these and hundreds of other songs about places on Spotimap, a fun, playable map audiographic that lets you click your way around the world to hear songs about cities. It’s not globally comprehensive (yet? see below), but it is an interesting way to access music about where you might live, where you’ve been, or where you’re thinking of traveling.
CartoDB engineer Javier Arce built the Spotimap hack using a list of songs about cities fromWikipedia, another table with the location of each city on the map, CatoDB’s slick data mapping service, and a music player that runs on the Spotify Web API.
He’s working on adding a few more cities, according to his blog (to put new songs about cities into the app, add them to the Wikipedia page), but Spotimap already works really well, running on CartoDB’s data mapping platform and the Spotify Web API. To hear songs about any city on the map on the embedded Spotify web player, click the music symbol on the map.
Some examples of what you will see:
Global map with songs about many more cities
Spotimap is open source. Source code and additional information are on Arce’s website.
