Top 50 Most Political Artists

Musicians are not shy about expressing their political opinions nor are politicians shy about courting favor of the musical elite.  As we approach the U.S. Presidential election I thought it would be interesting to see which artists have the most political capital.  To do this, I looked through all the recent news and blog posts (using The Echo Nest API) about each of the top 1,000 most popular artists and scored each artist based upon the number of election-related stories found for each artist.  I've taken the results of  this search and summarized the results in this app:

The Top 50 Most Political Artists 

Here's a screenshot:

Not surprisingly popular artists make lots of  news, and when a popular artists says or does something political it tends to make news, especially when what they say goes against expectations.  For example, when Nicki Minaj said she was going to vote for Mitt Romney it created a storm of hundreds of news articles and blog posts (and even a response from President Obama). Check out the list of top 50 political artists. Some common themes:  Musicians get pissed off if you use their music in your campaign and they don't agree with you, President Obama gets lots of love (and fundraising help) from popular artists, and sounding like a crazy artist gets you lots of attention.

    Also, check out this related post on how we are using musical taste to predict your politics.