Interactive Music Map Showcases the Most Sung-About Places in the World

New York City has inspired many a musician, from Frank Sinatra to Stevie Wonder to Alicia Keys. So it probably won’t come as a surprise that the “city that never sleeps” is the most sung-about place on the planet, with more than 160 songs mentioning it by name, according to an analysis of 200,000 popular songs from Celebrity Cruises.

This only accounts for songs that have landed in one of the top 40 spots on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 or UK Official Singles chart since 1960. Celebrity Cruises took the lyrics of those songs and conducted a linguistics analysis and data visualization to pinpoint the cities, neighborhoods, and states that feature most prominently in music. They ended up with 2000 songs by 896 artists who sang about 420 different places around the world.

An interactive tool called Music Mapped lets you explore these inspiring destinations. After New York, London is the second most-sung-about place with 101 songs, followed by Los Angeles (87 songs), the state of California (67 songs), and Hollywood (66 songs). You can also browse by genre and decade, so in case you’ve been dying to know how many ‘80s country/folk songs have been written about Nova Scotia, the answer is one ("Letter From America" by The Proclaimers).

You can also search by place, artist, or country. Of all the artists included in this analysis, Drake is the one who has name-dropped the most places in his lyrics. So far, he’s rapped about 29 places, including his hometown of Toronto and farther-flung destinations like Rotterdam in the Netherlands. Jay-Z has rapped about 27 places, followed by Elvis (who sang about 23 places), Tinie Tempah (22 places), and The Beach Boys (22 places).

Check out the Celebrity Cruises website to try out the interactive map for yourself.