PHILLY CONCERTS !
A (hopefully convincing) argument as to why the Philly concert scene is everything and anything a young music lover could want.
Introduction
I don't know a single person that doesn't like music, but I definitely know a lot of people who don't like Philly. The City of Brothers often gets overlooked, overshadowed by its bigger brothers (ahem NYC). But unbeknownst to outsiders, the unofficial heart of the Eastern Seaboard is home to one of the best and diverse music scenes.
There is a lot of music in Philly. And I mean A LOT. Let's just look at some numbers:
1474
Concerts already planned for 2019
1922
Different artists performing
861
Unique genres of music to experience
Here are just some of the most popular headliners scheduled to come to town:
But looking at a couple of numbers and a handful of names might not have convinced you, so let's dive a little deeper.
Cue the graphs!
1. GENRES
Here, we can see that Philly offers a plethora of genres, with no one music preference dominating the city. These genres were determined using Spotify's APl where I looked up the genres for each headlining artist.
Taking a look at artists in each genre, we can see that Philly attracts some of the biggest names in the respective categories popular among those in younger demographics.
2. Ticket Prices
Concerts are unfortunately not always the cheapest form of entertainment, especially when it comes to big ticket names. However, Philly offers a plethora of affordable tickets for those looking to discover brand new artists!
As shown above, there are many artists in Philly looking to break out. Select genres that catch your eye and see if you can find any good deals!
For those looking for the biggest bang for your buck, there are also many opportunities to watch many artists as many singers like to bring in second, third or even fifth acts! These would be great opportunities to experience new music and support multiple upcoming artists simultaneously.
3. The Venues
Here are all the venues that are currently booked for concerts:
Breaking each place down, we can observe that the most venues have booked concerts of a wide variety of genres. The Null values in the graph indicate that the artist was not listed on Spotify. To those of you that are more adventurous, definitely keep a look out for these venues as they host brand new artists!
We can observe that the most venues have booked concerts of a wide variety of genres. The Null values in the graph indicate that the artist was not listed on Spotify. To those of you that are more adventurous, definitely keep a look out for these venues as they host brand new artists!
Here we can see the average ticket prices per venue. Utilize the filter to chose your price range and view your options.
4. General Stats
Let's take a look at the most popular times for concerts on various granularity scales.
March has the highest number of scheduled concerts for the year. This is expected as most concerts are not planned more than 2-3 months in advance unless a big artist name is coming to town on tour.
Taking a look at only the 20 most popular artists, a majority of them are coming later in year during August and thus could potentially be great bookends to summer vacations.
Here is a more specific graph of when the artists are coming. If your favorite artist is in town, definitely mark your calendars!
Here are the most popular days for concerts. Not surprisingly, things seem to ramp up during the weekends.
These are the most popular times when doors open. Concerts tend to open around 7-9 PM, which are typical and overall convenient especially for those who work standard 9-5 jobs.
Concluding Remarks
Overall, Philly is a great place for all kinds of music lovers, especially for young (and extremely busy) workers. The city not only attracts big chart-topping names like Ariana Grande and Justin Timberlake, but also fosters a great community for newer artists, thus catering to younger demographics that love to follow trends, but are also constantly looking to explore. Philly offers tickets for all price ranges, but concerts with lesser-known artists are typically (and not-surprisingly) cheaper and still very affordable for this age demographic. With a plethora of options, Philly is the perfect place to listen and experience music.
Methodology
The data featured in this product was entirely scraped from Song Kick using webscraper.io. Starting from the list of all upcoming concerts in/near Philadelphia, I scraped each concert link for the name, date, location, and the headliner and secondary artists, as well as the ticket price. I then navigated to each headliner profile and scraped the number of fans and popularity ranking if they were listed. To gather the genre categories for each artist, I utilized Spotify's Developer API for Python and merged the list of relevant genres to the data set.
To prepare the data for analysis, I cleaned the data using both Open Refine and Tableau Prep. In Open Refine, I clustered similar venues and artists together. I also cleaned most columns for leading spaces or changing fields to numerics or dates such as the price and time columns. I also cleaned the list of genres and secondary artists by eliminating the list structure and instead having them in a comma-separated format. I then stored the first genre in the list in a separate field while also counting the number of secondary artists.
I utilized Tableau to create all the visualizations on the page, taking advantage of the numerous chart formats available. I primarily focused on showing the plethora of options available to music consumers in Philly, while also highlighting big names or popular venues. I created visualizations centered around 4 key aspects: genres, ticket prices, venues and general statistics. I also utilized Tableau to calculate the general overview numbers featured at the very top in addition to the word cloud of most popular artists.
About me
My name is Younghu Park and I am currently a sophomore pursuing an uncoordinated dual-degree in The Wharton School of Business and School of Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. This data project was created for Prasanna Tambe's course, OIDD245: Analytics & The Digital Economy.