Listening to music from other parts of the world is easy thanks to services like YouTube and Spotify, but finding out the number one songs in each region takes a little more work. Fortunately, the portal called The Cultural Borders of Music reduces the search to a couple of clicks with a map that shows us the top tracks across 3,000 cities.
What is the most-listened-to song in Tokyo right now? The first thing that comes to mind is some new J-Pop idol, but if we go by YouTube views we'll discover that a viral video called "Dancing Hero" and the track "Likey" by South Korean band Twice have taken over the entire Japanese territory.
And in South Korea itself? Right now the crown belongs to Red Velvet with their track "Peek-A-Boo" — and I say "right now" because if there is anything more volatile than cryptocurrencies, it's the popularity of K-Pop bands.
On the other side of the planet we find "Gucci Gang" by Lil Pump, "Criminal" by Natti Natasha x Ozuna, and "Havana" by Camila Cabello, whose video (I must admit) is pretty good.
A simple way to explore the charts
All these musical details are available without restrictions; however, what we need is a simple and effective way to visualize them. That's when the portal The Cultural Borders of Music steps in — a map that records the most-listened-to tracks across 3,000 different regions. The portal requires no secondary downloads, and it works directly in our browsers. In the top-left corner there's a search box with which we can locate a specific region, and on the right there's a list of global results. As of writing, the number one song is "Perfect" by Ed Sheeran (561 million plays in two months).
The Cultural Borders of Music is excellent, but at the same time it's striking that there isn't so much diversity of songs, or maybe YouTube's telemetry is more limited than we think.
