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Arts & Entertainment

Where Coachella Acts Come From and What That Says About American Music

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Photo by neonspecs via the LAist Featured Photos pool

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Which corners of the world are doing their best to rep at Coachella?

The Atlantic's Richard Florida crunched the numbers of the line-up and found that Swedes, Brits, Austinites and Angelenos are overrepresented at the festival.

Florida first looked at which cities are sending the most acts, and London rose to the top of the heap with Los Angeles and New York not far behind:

But all three of those cities are pretty big, so of course they're going to produce more bands. So Florida compared how many acts each city has at Coachella to its overall population. The proportions reveal something interesting: Stockholm musicians end up overrepresented. Austin also rises up to the #2 spot, but London is still sending a lot of acts, proportional to its size:

This isn't news exactly, but the numbers prove that this sliver of the American music scene is pretty global: 71 out of 141 acts at Coachella are from abroad.

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