Study: New York, L.A. not the most influential music cities

This will come as no surprise to anyone who's been to a show at the Echo where half the audience is frantically texting about the great time they're having (at the expense of watching the set): Particular cities are influential in shaping music tastes. But how exactly does that influencer-chain work, and how does it differ among genres? Two Cornell researchers have a new paper that tries to diagram how one gets from a Patient Zero with a rad underground 7-inch in Montreal to an album of the year Grammy.

The paper, by Conrad Lee and Padraig Cunningham, uses an influence-modeling method gleaned from the study of bird-flock leadership to track how taste patterns spread over geography in Last.fm users. In short? Montreal, Atlanta and Oslo are the early adopters; New York and L.A. are relative bit players.