~4,700
locations discovered
Real-time global music atlas
From static snapshot to live cultural geography
Cultural Borders is an interactive map that shows what people are listening to across countries, regions, and cities using YouTube Charts. It is inspired by The Pudding's original Cultural Borders, but designed as a dynamic experience instead of a single frozen monthly picture.
~90,000
chart rows in dataset
Top 20
tracks per territory
10x
parallel chart workers
What makes it different
- Near real-time chart data rather than a historical one-off export.
- Exploration beyond rank #1, including full local ranking context.
- Hierarchical territorial browsing: city, subcountry, country.
- A non-overlapping global geometry that preserves local specificity.
How the pipeline works
- Discover locations through YouTube Music autocomplete APIs.
- Fetch chart data in parallel for each territory identifier.
- Collect map geometries from OpenStreetMap (Nominatim).
- Apply topological flattening and simplification for web delivery.
Data model used by the web app
The map front-end joins two core files: combined_map.geojson (geometry + identifiers) and charts_tracks.csv (ranked tracks, artists, views, links, thumbnails).
Each map feature includes a unique yt_id and hierarchy rank so interactions can resolve instantly to the correct local chart list.
Technology stack
Credits and references
Concept inspiration: The Pudding - Cultural Borders.
Data and geographic foundations: YouTube Charts, OpenStreetMap, and Nominatim.
Developed by rogersanjaume.cat.