Travel in a different city or country can often be best enjoyed when there’s some preparation that happens beforehand, such as learning a bit of the local language or figuring out what dress is appropriate. While useful, these readiness tasks are not always considered the fun part of planning for a journey to a new destination. What is fun about preparing for a trip to an unfamiliar locale is learning about the local culture through music.

Music helps tell the stories of people and the places where they live, and it connects individuals who otherwise might not find anything in common. To become more intimate with the location you’ll be spending time in on your next trip, you can always research top bands and artists in the city or country you’ll be visiting. Or, you can let Spotify World Music Map show you what tunes are most popular around the globe.

Spotify World Music Map Lets You Listen Like a Local

Spotify World Music Map is like your personal pro music curator, offering you playlists to listen to online that feature the top songs in cities all over the world. Spotify Data Alchemist (what a fun title to have!) Glenn McDonald is in charge of analyzing “billions of listener-track interactions on a regular basis to distill each place’s musical character into those distinctive playlists.” What this means for you is that you can immerse yourself in the musical soul of a city before you even arrive there, so that you’ll have already entered the gateway into what living in that place is like. Fully living like a local, not just functioning as a tourist. That’s the kind of travel we like.

Imagine streaming hits from Paris, London, Tokyo, New York City, or another city in the world – big or small – and getting a feeling for the songs that inspire, make people get up and dance, and talk of love and romance. With a music map of songs like Spotify offers on it’s World Music Map, you can have a sense of the tunes that people around the globe are playing when they get ready for a night out, go for drive up the coast, head out for a power walk, or settle in with a candlelit dinner and nice bottle of wine. Spotify World Music Map reinforces the fact that music really is a universal language.

How Does it Work?

It’s easy to let Spotify World Music Map help you truly appreciate the nuances in music and explore how people all over the world get their groove on. World Music Map navigation has simple drag and zoom functionality, and hearing a city’s distinctive music is just a matter of clicking an a city or country to listen to top-charting and most-popular music. Spotify World Music Map gives you a interactive and unique way to better understand the character of a place before you visit, a great way to “know before you go,” we’d say. More than 1,000 cities worldwide show up on the Spotify World Music Map, and curated lists change each week according to what’s trending and noteworthy.

You can discover emerging music and artists with Spotify World Music Map or uncover a city’s treasures. All of the playlists put together for you are what’s playing in the cars, headphones, and homes of people who may be unlike you in some ways but more like you than you might have imagined.