This is something I’ve been working towards for a long time, having a map like this is a big goal for me. What you have here is an interactive map on google of all the locations I have 45s from, that I know of anyway. I started keeping location data back in 2020 when I did a big project to post one record from each US state on instagram. It might not look like it, but this map is the culmination of at least 100 hours of work. I went through each record in the collection and found out where the label and/or artist was from and logged it on lists. I still have a *big* list of unknown location records that I want to figure out someday, but for now this is what I got.
This map is made up of data from the DC Archives 45 rpm collection. So there are no locations from LPs here. Also this is just one point for each location. So if I have 20 records from Cleveland and 1 record from Kenosha the map will show them equally. This is a beginning, a rough draft. Eventually I want to have a map like this on the database where you can not only see the points like this but also the amount of records from each location with data about amount of records from each state, region, etc.
The other major point for this data is that I’ve left of all major labels and most big labels. For instance, Starday isn’t included here because it’s a big country label. The big names like Decca, RCA, and Capitol are not included either. My goal is to have a map like this that shows where normal people were making and releasing records, and if we include the majors then the map will become heavily skewed to a handful of big cities.
You can browse the map here: RECORD LOCATIONS MAP
Cheers
Franklin
PS. if you see spots where I don’t have records from and have any you’d like to donate then please reach out, I’d be happy to add them to the database!