Explore Spotify’s New Musical Map To Hear Playlists From Around The World

Whether you’re traveling in the coming months or unhappily chained to your desk for the entire summer, Spotify’s new musical map may come in handy.

The music streaming platform unveiled an interactive map on Monday that will transport you to locales across the world, with playlists of the most “distinctive” music culled from almost a thousand cities. In a blog post, Spotify described what makes music from one place distinct from that of another:

…when most travelers visit another place, they don’t seek out the same food they eat at home, even if they can find it. We travel to experience what makes a place different, and special, by sampling local specialties.

Let’s try the same approach with music, on a big map of the world. You can click any of nearly a thousand cities to hear a playlist of the music that is most distinctively enjoyed there.

What do we mean by “distinctive?” This is music that people in each city listen to quite a bit, which people in other cities also do not listen to very much. So it is, exactly, the music that makes them different from people everywhere else.

The playlists are updated twice a month, and according to Spotify, are the result of collecting data from more than 20 billion “listener/track relationships.”

We’ve embedded Spotify’s map below, for your browsing pleasure.

[via Spotify]