About BeatGrove
I love music. And I love mapping things.
A record sleeve will tell you who played on a track. I wanted a way to follow the scene around it, too. On BeatGrove, you can start with a genre, find its artists and see where the music has put down roots.
On BeatGrove, you can listen to music by a huge range of artists for free and discover hundreds of genres you never knew existed. A streaming feed might pick your next track for you. Here, you choose what to explore next. Stay with a sound you love, try an unfamiliar artist, or pick a country and see what you find.
Discover music by country
The music scenes by country directory brings together genres with roots in each place. Start with Sweden’s music scenes, then explore Sweden on BeatGrove. On desktop and tablet, the link opens the 3D music map with Sweden selected; on your phone, it opens the country’s genres.
Many sources, one map
My starting point was Every Noise at Once, Glenn McDonald’s extraordinary exploration of musical genres. It gave me a first landscape to explore, and the desire to keep going.
The credits below tell you where the music, pictures and artist notes come from. What you can play depends on the artist, the service and your region.
Listening and watching
- Spotify
- Artist portraits, releases, track lists and top tracks. Guests can use Spotify’s embedded player. Full tracks require an eligible connected Premium account and an available playback device.
- Apple Music
- Artist and album catalogues, cover art and track credits. Apple’s iTunes catalogue supplies public previews. MusicKit can play full songs for listeners with an authorized Apple Music subscription.
- Deezer
- Artist photos, album covers, track credits and audio previews. The Deezer widget controls the length available to a signed-in listener.
- TIDAL
- Artist profiles, recording credits and tracks in TIDAL’s embedded player. TIDAL determines how much of a track can play.
- YouTube
- Music videos and performances in the YouTube player. Official artist and Topic channels also supply descriptions, images, video titles and public channel statistics.
- Amazon Music
- Track listings, cover images and samples when a matching recording has an Amazon preview.
- Audiomack
- Preview audio for recordings matched against a verified artist repertoire.
- MusicAPI
- Helps BeatGrove find matching recordings on Amazon Music and Audiomack for the player.
- Jamendo
- Independent artists, album credits and streamable recordings, including full tracks when available.
- NetEase Cloud Music
- Artist pages, song and album credits, cover art and playable audio. Depending on the recording, the stream can be a preview or a full track.
- Kuwo Music
- Artist and album credits, track listings and available streams. BeatGrove checks the audio duration before labelling a track as full-length.
- Vimeo
- External video links attached to selected Discogs releases open the performance on Vimeo.
Artist profiles, recordings and listening statistics
- MusicBrainz
- Artist identities and aliases, recording and release credits, relationships, annotations, genre tags and links to other catalogues.
- Discogs
- Discographies, release editions, track lists, personnel, genres, styles, cover images and linked performance videos. Verified profiles can also provide artist photos.
- Last.fm
- Artist biographies, listener tags, popular tracks, images and public listening statistics. Play counts help determine artist size on the map.
- TheAudioDB
- Biographies, portraits, genre information and recorded country of origin for identified artists.
- fanart.tv
- Community-contributed artist photos and artwork matched by MusicBrainz artist ID.
- Wikipedia
- Biographical summaries, musical styles and histories of local scenes. Artist pages link back to the source article.
- Wikidata
- Artist identifiers, links between language editions and sourced statements about origins and occupations.
- Bandcamp
- Artist-written profiles, releases, tags and locations from verified artist or label pages.
- Genius
- Artist pages and credited songs help verify identity and distinguish namesakes.
- VGMdb
- Soundtrack editions, disc and track titles, artist credits and transliterations used to cross-check game music.
- JOOX
- Regional artist pages, track credits and charts used to research artists and scenes.
- Yandex Music
- Artist profiles and recording credits used to match artists across catalogues.
- Beatport
- Electronic release credits and styles used in targeted catalogue research.
Genres, geography and musical relationships
- Every Noise at Once
- Glenn McDonald’s map of styles and scenes provided the starting point for BeatGrove’s genre map.
- The Sound Atlas
- Genre histories, geographical anchors, family relationships and examples of artists associated with a scene.
- African Music Library
- Descriptions of African genres, places of origin, artists, biographies and repertoire.
- GetGenre
- Style attributions for releases, used as evidence when reviewing an artist’s classification.
- DOREMUS
- Linked institutional catalogues connect musicians, works and performances.
- Overture
- The DOREMUS service suggests related artists, matched back to identified artists in BeatGrove.
- Bibliothèque nationale de France
- Authority records, variant names and bibliographic context for artists and works.
- ISNI
- International identifiers help distinguish public identities with similar names.
Cross-platform matching and research collections
- AudioMeta
- Artist IDs, service links, biographies, genres, country information and images for catalogue research.
- Musicfetch
- Cross-platform artist profiles, biographies and portrait links matched from a verified service URL.
- MusicLink
- Matching service URLs and recording identifiers used to check whether profiles refer to the same artist.
- Electronic Music Knowledge
- Discogs-linked artist records, genres and country information for electronic music research.
- fairygaze/music
- Cross-service artist identifiers and links checked against MusicBrainz or Discogs.
- Spotify Metadata Parquet
- Spotify artist identifiers and genre metadata used in catalogue comparisons.
- Music Wiki
- Artist descriptions checked against the linked Wikipedia article and artist identity.
- YouTube Music index
- Channel identifiers, artist names and track references used to verify YouTube links.
Additional references and research tools
Individual artist records also cite these services for identity, credits or official profile links.
For editorial checks, Exa and Tavily help find public sources. Firecrawl and ScrapingBee help read those pages. Nebius Token Factory helps review genre evidence, and Jev via Vercel AI Gateway weighs competing artist matches. DeepL translates biographies into English.
No single catalogue covers everything. Combining them helps fill gaps, while keeping track of where information comes from. Their contributors, librarians, researchers, and communities make this project possible.
How to read the music map
Each layer of the globe holds a musical family. Look at Japan on the Pop layer, then switch to Rock. The country stays put while the genres above it change.
A place on the map can mark the beginnings of a sound, a local scene that adopted it, or a tradition with roots in the region. An artist’s birthplace alone tells me too little to place a whole genre there. When the sources point to several places or leave the question open, I keep the genre on an outer layer with its musical relatives.
Find your way from a genre to an artist
On a desktop or tablet, turn the globe and pick a genre. Its neighbors are good places to browse next. To hear who plays it, open the sampler and choose an artist. Have a name or a song in mind? You can search for it on the map, too.
You can explore the 3D music map or browse the music genre directory without an account. Sign in to keep your favorites, ratings and listening history between visits.
How I decide what goes where
Two genres can sit close together because they share a scene, even when their records sound quite different. I use those connections as listening suggestions. Distances on the map give only a rough guide to musical similarity.
I use AI to help build BeatGrove, organize information and review data. I keep track of my sources so I can revisit a decision when someone turns up a better credit, a local history or a recording I’ve missed.
Why I’m making BeatGrove
BeatGrove is my non-commercial project for listeners and researchers. You might arrive looking for one artist and leave with the name of a whole scene. That’s the kind of afternoon I had in mind.
What’s missing from the map?
I’m adding artists and scenes as I find them. If you know a record, a scene or a source I should look into, send me a suggestion. For research questions, you can also email me directly.