Yesterday would have been Elvis Presley's 80th birthday and we just can't get enough of the awesome coverage that folks on the internet have come up with to mark the occasion. Spotify's Insights blog once again uses data gathered by its Echo Nest, this time to create "The Elvis Influence," an application that traces any performer you enter all the way back to Elvis by way of influence. Some performers obviously have longer trails back to The King than others so often, unlike Kevin Bacon, you need more than six steps to get back.
The methodology behind the project involved Paul Lemere, the director of development at The Echo Nest, mapped the influence of Elvis upon other performers and then how those performers impact other acts in more diverse genres. This process involved both similar music styles and the data from the Rovi database.
For example, we entered The Dillinger Escape Plan—a very spastic hardcore group, guitar-based but far from the relatively sane Presley—in the search bar. The Elvis Influence traced that band back to The Melvins, who were influenced by Gene Simmons, who was directly influenced by Presley. Not too difficult. We made it a bit tougher by going to hip-hop, starting with Run The Jewels. They're similar to Danny Brown, who enjoys E-40, who makes the genre jump to Parliament, who was influenced by Rufus Thomas. The platform takes an interesting change of pace by noting that Thomas influenced Presley and not the other way around.
The best thing about this application, like other Spotify experiments in the past, is that it encourages fans to check out the performers that come in between Presley and their choice. Especially cool for Thomas, a soul singer on the Sun Records label at the same time as Presley during the '50s.
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