Six Degrees of 33s

The Graph10 articles

Connectivity, centrality, distance, giant components — the network itself.

• Central, But Not Between

  Hal Blaine played on more hit records than any drummer alive, and the graph agrees he is close to everyone — closeness rank 2,004 of 985,554. It also insists almost nothing depends on him. Both centrality measures are right, and the difference between them is the whole lesson.

• Load-Bearing Musicians — who holds the music world together

  Exact betweenness rankings over all of MusicBrainz — the members, producers, and songwriters whose careers are the bridges other musicians cross.

• Miles Davis Is the Root of Bob Dylan

  Ban the Sun City wormhole and measure the real distance between the two revolutions — Dylan's acoustic folk records were already staffed by bebop players two handshakes from Miles, starting with Dylan's first session.

• Rootless

  Search for major artists who were never in a band and the answer isn't pop stars — it's Stephen King, with 27,132 recordings. Then Kesha. And Lady Gaga misses the cut by one bar band from 2005.

• Self-Contained Universes

  1.1 million artists connect to nothing — a connected-components census of MusicBrainz by collaboration layer, and the strange giant catalogs that float alone.

• Snoop Dogg Has Met Everyone

  Count distinct collaborators across every recording and the all-time champion is Snoop Dogg with 1,822 — narrowly ahead of Frank Sinatra. Two empires of handshakes, one crown.

• The Far Shore

  Start at Quincy Jones and walk outward through 1.3 million connected musicians — the median artist is three introductions away, and the farthest shore is a 1922 Madrid revue, fourteen introductions deep.

• The Romance Graph

  MusicBrainz records 9,713 marriages and 1,774 relationships between artists. Assembled into one graph, they form a French-speaking giant, a tabloid archipelago — and a Fleetwood Mac split neatly in half.

• The Rooms — studios and venues that connect musical worlds

  Recording places ranked by how many shortest player-to-player introduction chains pass through the sessions held there.

• The Width of the World

  First an expedition, then a census — every one of the 485,657,850,681 pairs of connected musicians measured exactly. Recorded music really is six degrees (6.2650 on the nose), its diameter is exactly 26 handshakes, and a certified center of the musical universe is a Hungarian conductor who died in 1963.