
Hi everyone!
I’ve always been fascinated by how music transcends (or reinforces) physical borders. Inspired by the original "Cultural Borders" project by The Pudding, I wanted to create a version that wasn’t just a static snapshot, but a live, hierarchical geography of music.
Link to the project: https://catbru.github.io/cultural-borders-yt-charts-web/
Posted by cat_bru
![[OC] Cultural Borders: A real-time interactive map of what the world is listening to (YouTube Charts) [OC] Cultural Borders: A real-time interactive map of what the world is listening to (YouTube Charts)](https://www.byteseu.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/mwq0mzvyqvog1-1536x743.png)
8 Comments
**How I built it (The “Beautiful” Data part):**
* **Data Sources:** Music data is fetched via YouTube Charts APIs. Map geometries are sourced from OpenStreetMap (Nominatim).
* **Data Pipeline:** I built a pipeline using **Python and GeoPandas** to discover locations via autocomplete APIs and fetch chart data in parallel (using 10 parallel workers to handle the ~90k rows of data).
* **Frontend:** The map is rendered using **MapLibre GL JS**, handling the `combined_map.geojson` and `charts_tracks.csv` files on the fly. I used topological simplification to ensure the map remains performant on web browsers.
**Key Features:**
* **Granularity:** Unlike most music maps that only show countries, this includes ~4,700 locations including cities and sub-regions.
* **Beyond #1:** You can explore the full Top 20 context for each specific territory.
* **Non-overlapping Geometry:** I used a custom global geometry that preserves local specificity while allowing instant interaction.
But the colours, what do they mean?
Interesting that the Brazilian Phonk artist (ZXKAI) is #1 all over Russia but not even charting in Brazil itself.
One of the few actual good posts from this sub. Cool project.
Bang Bang by Ive eating as usual
nice map. Italian top 3 songs are the top three position in Festival di Sanremo (Italian music biggest show of the year). The first one “per sempre sì” will go to eurovision this year.
Cool but I feel like you shouldn’t be responding with AI in the comments
Thank you for sharing – what a cool resource
wher this information/data is being taken from?