The Question

Once upon a time, I noticed that it seems like Baton Rouge gets more song mentions than you would think it would. There's no history of great bands from here, and there's nothing espcially songworthy here. I suspected that it's because it's on the way to New Orleans, and songwriters might just be passing through as they find they need something to rhyme with "gets the blues."

But I'm also open to the possibility that it just jumps out at me more because that's where I live. So I decided to apply some science and find out the answer.

For a number of cities, I checked the number of google results from lyrics.wikia.com, excluding the hometown. For example, I searched "site:lyrics.wikia.com Nashville -hometown" to find the number of times "Nashville" appeared in song lyrics. This wasn't as easy as it sounds. I had to eliminate "Whitney" from the Houston search and "Miama Sound Machine" from the Miami search. I don't know how to get results for Austin (lots of last name Austin songwriting credits) or for Phoenix, Boston, or Chicago (how do I eliminate the ones that were just performed by those bands?).

Result Set 1

This first chart plots the number of mentions for each city. As I expected, Baton Rouge is unusually high.

Note: the number of mentions for New York is so far off the chart (19,500) that it made the rest of the cities look similar in scale. So understand that it's bar continues to go way off to the right.

Result Set 2

Next, I decided to go a step deeper and figure out the number of mentions per person in the city. That wasn't as easy as it seems either. I started with the city population, but then I noticed that Orlando has about the same population as Baton Rouge, and Miami has not much more than that. So that's clearly not the number that I wanted. I switched the Metro Area Population. I used the numbers from Wikipedia, so they could be extremely flawed.

Data

Here's the raw information behind the two charts that you see. If you see something that looks completely wrong, or if you have another city that you would like to see added, let me know (email link to the left), and I'll update this page from time to time.

The little balloon means that I had some little tidbit of info that struck me as interesting when doing the exercise for that city. You can hover over the city name to see it. Also, you can hover over the number of mentions to see the date that I looked up the numbers for that city.

City	# of Mentions	Population	Metro Area Population	Mentions per 1000 Population	Mentions per 10,000 in Metro Area
Baton Rouge	612	229553	802484	2.666	7.626
Columbus	1010	787033	1773120	1.283	5.696
Dallas	2940	1197816	6477315	2.454	4.539
Detriot	3280	3863924	4296250	0.849	7.635
Gainesville	58	114375	258555	0.507	2.243
Houston	4360	2099451	6108060	2.077	7.138
Indianapolis	130	829718	1834672	0.157	0.709
Memphis	6740	646889	1280533	10.419	52.634
Miami	1710	399457	5547051	4.281	3.083
Nashville	2510	626681	1670891	4.005	15.022
Natchitoches	3	17865	17865	0.168	1.679
New Orleans	5030	343829	1235650	14.629	40.707
New York	19500	8175133	18897109	2.385	10.319
Orlando	559	238300	2082628	2.346	2.684
Portland	491	583776	2226009	0.841	2.206
San Francisco	2060	805235	4335391	2.558	4.752
Seattle	1140	608660	3407848	1.873	3.345
Starkville	7	23888	23888	0.293	2.93