Six Degrees of 33s

6D33: patterns the graph reveals — each one a query over the whole of MusicBrainz, recomputed on every data update.

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The Innocents AbroadPlacesRevised 2026-08-28
1,217 working bands wear the name of a place on Earth. Twelve formed in it; 1,051 provably did not; not one member of the others is from the place either. A ledger, an atlas with insets and click-through lists, and the songs — Deutschland is sung by Germans, Germany by everyone else.
249 Bands Called IndigoNames & TitlesRevised 2026-08-27
The most duplicated artist names in the database, ranked — a census of the words everyone reaches for, from Indigo and Legion to the 56 acts that are simply named Q.
3,011 Albums Called DemoNames & TitlesRevised 2026-08-27
The most common album titles in existence, ranked — Demo beats Greatest Hits, Roman numerals form a dynasty, and the moods cluster like a horoscope.
A Field Guide to Band NamesNames & TitlesRevised 2026-08-27
A word-census across 2.9 million artist names — black beats every other color, foxes beat wolves by four, dogs beat cats by eighteen, and forty-two acts are named Kraken.
ALL CAPSNames & TitlesRevised 2026-08-27
Artists who spell their name entirely in capitals — KISS, ABBA, AC/DC, MF DOOM, and the rest of the shouty ones.
Bing Crosby Is Still Winning ChristmasThe CalendarRevised 2026-08-27
24,060 Christmas-titled records, ranked by artist — Crosby's 135, Bach's accidental 129, Marillion's inexplicable 27, and the band that is 29% Christmas by volume.
Born in the BandBands & LineupsRevised 2026-08-27
5,579 bands contain at least one pair of siblings. At the top of the table: twelve Rodrigueses, nine Winanses, eight brass-playing brothers, and seven Kanneh-Masons.
Born on the First of JanuaryLivesRevised 2026-08-27
265,358 musician birthdays claim day-level precision — and the calendar of them is haunted. January 1st runs at double rate, and the runners-up are 5/5, 7/7, 6/6, 2/2, and Valentine's Day.
Central, But Not BetweenThe GraphRevised 2026-08-27
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.
Duets With the DeadLivesRevised 2026-08-27
Recordings where the credited performers were born more than a century apart — Walt Whitman's wax cylinder, Einstein on a French art-pop album, and Mahler accompanying a soprano born in 1980.
Every City Had a Wrecking CrewCredits & CraftRevised 2026-08-27
Erase the legends, keep only the timestamps and street addresses, and ask each city who played on its 1962–1972 recordings — out fall the Funk Brothers, the Swampers, the Memphis Boys, name for name.
Every Genre Has a LengthGenresRevised 2026-08-27
Median song lengths across 212 genres form a ruler from grindcore (1:58) to symphony (8:17) — and each genre's number is a fossil of the medium it was born on. Doo-wop still keeps 45-rpm time. Techno still keeps 12-inch time. Country holds the three-minute line to the second.
Formerly Known As, Formerly Known AsNames & TitlesRevised 2026-08-27
Bands molt. MusicBrainz records 1,937 official renames, and chaining them reveals five-name evolutions, a Swedish giant born as "Jones & the Poison," and metalcore's compulsive shedding.
Forty Minutes, Give or TakeRecords & SongsRevised 2026-08-27
Seventy years of album runtimes say the album is a forty-minute idea that has now survived three containers. Vinyl held it at 38; the CD swelled it to 51; streaming has spent twenty-five years exhaling it back to 40 — while the track count never moved from ten.
Greatest Number of Greatest HitsNames & TitlesRevised 2026-08-27
Which artists have amassed the most greatest-hits albums — Greatest Hits, Golden Greats, All the Best, Best Of, and the rest of the repackaging machine.
How Do You Spell Tchaikovsky?Names & TitlesRevised 2026-08-27
Eighty-seven ways, according to the record sleeves of the world — the alias tables as a museum of transliteration, typography, and typos, starring Tchaikovsky, Lady Gaga, and DSCH.
InseparableGenresRevised 2026-08-27
The genre pairs most inseparably fused in practice — a Turkish nightclub, a Thai rice belt, one NME cassette from 1986, and a genre statistically inseparable from its own adjective.
Intro, Outro, UntitledNames & TitlesRevised 2026-08-27
The most common song title across 39.6 million recordings is the announcement that a song is about to happen. The first title that's actually a song doesn't appear until eighth place.
Is Kansas Prog?GenresRevised 2026-08-27
The database's answer to fifty years of record-fair argument: the artist file asserts eleven genres at once, the album trail shows progressive rock present 1974–1982, missing exactly 1983–1988, and back from 1995 — and the membership table shows where the prog went in the meantime. With a genre-climate reading of every side project.
Load-Bearing Musicians — who holds the music world togetherThe GraphRevised 2026-08-27
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 DylanThe GraphRevised 2026-08-27
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.
Motown Was a Family. Literally.Bands & LineupsRevised 2026-08-27
Start at Berry Gordy and follow only blood and marriage — three hops reach Marvin Gaye, Diana Ross's children, Redfoo, and the entire Jackson family. Fifty people, one payroll.
Musical TrifectasNames & TitlesRevised 2026-08-27
Full-length albums where the artist, the album, and one of its songs all share the same name — and how often that turns out to be metal.
Named AfterNames & TitlesRevised 2026-08-27
MusicBrainz records 968 artists explicitly named after other artists — Pink Floyd's two bluesmen, the chain from Taylor Swift back to James Taylor, and the strange gravity of Macintosh Plus.
New vs Not NewNames & TitlesRevised 2026-08-27
Bands named "New X" (or "The New X") beside the plain "X" that came first — New Yardbirds and the Yardbirds, and the rest.
Ninety Names on One SongCredits & CraftRevised 2026-08-27
The most crowded recordings in the database aren't charity singles — they're Japanese idol-game anthems. A study in how cultures count their crowds.
Ninety-Eight MasksNames & TitlesRevised 2026-08-27
Vaporwave is the most anonymous genre in the database — 2.6% of its artists reach Wikidata — and simultaneously the most aliased. One artist wears 98 names, including a Florida shopping mall. Even Macintosh Plus has impostors.
Nobody Fears Track 13Records & SongsRevised 2026-08-27
2.8 million album discs, counted — the superstition isn't there. Track 13 dips less than 9 or 11 do. What albums actually worship is the number ten, and evenness itself.
Nothing Happens Before You're 27 (Except Everything)LivesRevised 2026-08-27
The most common age to release a debut album is 27 — the same number the death myth stole. Plus the far shore of late starts: the pianist who debuted at 100.
Old Enough to Start a BandLivesRevised 2026-08-27
Across ninety years the median founding member has stubbornly been 21 to 23 years old — but the share of founders over 35 has quadrupled since the sixties. The garage now belongs to two generations.
ParensNames & TitlesRevised 2026-08-27
Band names with parentheses — and how often the ( and the ) don't add up. Sunn O))) has three closers and no opener.
RootlessThe GraphRevised 2026-08-27
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.
Salieri's RevengeCredits & CraftRevised 2026-08-27
Run every teacher-student link in the database to its transitive end and the movie's patron saint of mediocrity has 6,889 musical descendants — but even he is not the biggest classroom in music history.
Self-Contained UniversesThe GraphRevised 2026-08-27
1.1 million artists connect to nothing — a connected-components census of MusicBrainz by collaboration layer, and the strange giant catalogs that float alone.
Ships of TheseusBands & LineupsRevised 2026-08-27
The Fall had one fixed point and forty-odd moving parts — a complete membership chart of the most replaced band in Britain, plus the working groups that no longer contain anyone who founded them.
Snoop Dogg Has Met EveryoneThe GraphRevised 2026-08-27
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.
Songs in the Key of Z, measuredNames & TitlesRevised 2026-08-27
Irwin Chusid's outsider-music canon run through the collaboration graph — self-containment scores for Jandek, The Shaggs, Wesley Willis, and the family pod the Wiggin sisters lived in.
That Name Is TakenNames & TitlesRevised 2026-08-27
132,336 band names are used by more than one act. The most contested — Indigo, Legion, Vortex, Merlin — read like a teenager's notebook, and 83 bands named Medusa produced zero famous ones.
The 1,024-Character Song TitleNames & TitlesRevised 2026-08-27
Twenty-four song titles in the database are exactly 1,024 characters long, because that's where the field ends — a natural history of titles that hit the wall mid-sentence.
The 27 Club, CountedLivesRevised 2026-08-27
76,641 musician lifespans say the most famous number in rock mythology is not a spike, not a cluster, not even a bump — and yet the number 27 still marks a real boundary somewhere else entirely.
The 582-Hour SongRecords & SongsRevised 2026-08-27
49,228 recordings run longer than an hour; 210 run longer than a day; one runs twenty-four days. A logarithmic tour of duration's far end, where song titles become math.
The A BinNames & TitlesRevised 2026-08-27
The legend says bands name themselves to the front of the record bin, like AAA Taxi in the phone book. The bin is innocent — A-through-D held steady at a quarter of new bands for a century. The letter A alone is another matter; it nearly doubled, peaked in the exact decade your record collection became a sorted list, and has been falling ever since.
The Alphabet Is TakenNames & TitlesRevised 2026-08-27
Every letter A–Z and every digit 0–9 is already an artist's name. A tour of the periodic table of one-character bands — X, M, Q, and the 56 people who all chose Q.
The Band That Releases Every NightRecords & SongsRevised 2026-08-27
97% of Phish's discography is live albums. Springsteen has out-released the Grateful Dead's vault. A census of the bands whose real product is the concert itself.
The Busiest Day in Recording History (Did Not Occur)The CalendarRevised 2026-08-27
21.5 million recordings carry an exact date. The champion day is December 4, 2020, with 18,499 — and every one of the 25 busiest days in recording history is a Friday of the streaming era. Nobody was in the studio. The date field records commerce, not microphones.
The Business Card AlbumNames & TitlesRevised 2026-08-27
In the 1970s, one debut album in four was named after its maker. The self-titled debut — the business card of rock — has since lost two-thirds of its force: 26.5% of Seventies debuts, 11% by the 2000s, 8.6% now. The census of a convention.
The Credit ShadowCredits & CraftRevised 2026-08-27
Ask the ledger for its busiest performers with the fewest albums to their name and you get three species at once — bandmen whose 30,000 recordings are filed under somebody else's marquee, Duke Ellington's entire horn section, and the men who read Harry Potter and the Bible aloud. An investigation into who does the work when the band gets the byline.
The Cult and the ColossusGenresRevised 2026-08-27
King's X and Rush are the same shape — a power trio, frozen for decades, worshipped by musicians. The graph measures the fame gap, and finds one perfect inversion — outside their band, all of Rush has 38 recordings; Doug Pinnick alone has 159.
The Day Music Comes OutThe CalendarRevised 2026-08-27
Sixty years of release dates show three different industries — the loose Friday world of vinyl, the UK-Monday/US-Tuesday split of the CD era, and the great global flip of July 2015.
The Divorce Album, MeasuredBands & LineupsRevised 2026-08-27
9,684 marriages between musicians, 1,035 divorces with discographies attached — and a timing pattern the mythology gets backwards. The divorce album ships before the divorce.