Final Project Proposal

For my final project I plan on making a choropleth map of Europe countries using music recording data.

The data will be from the International Federation Phonographic Industry (IFPI) reports called “Recording Industry in Numbers” which releases every year with updated data and the last 4 years of data . The report complies data from all countries main data source that documents the record industry stats. For example Recording Industry Association of America for America.

Like I stated earlier I’ll be focusing on Europe countries, which are Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey and the UK.  Which in total is 24 countries that I have data for.

Here is an example of how a portion of the data looks for a country on the report this one is France.

Primarily I want to create two maps side by side of these countries looking at the 2007 and the 2011 percentage of sales that are subscription based music services. ( I could also look at physical sales and total digital sales). The audience of this map ranges from labels seeing if its lucrative to have catalogs of music distributed through subscription services or investors looking to dip into the market of subscription services. 

Example of the type of map I want to make. 

The reason I want to focus on Europe is because music sales in Europe work in an interesting fashion. Having a song reach the top of the charts of one country almost guarantees you will also do well in the charts in other areas. For example a hit song in Germany will garner attention in most of Eastern Europe. A hit song in France will spread throughout Canada and even French influenced areas in Africa.

Also subscriptions services such as Spotify and Rdio have been increasingly popular through the last few years it would be interesting to see how much of the market they actually hold in terms of sales. Especially in Europe considering countries such as Finland, Spain, France and Greece all have laws that everyone should have access to the internet, so more people would be able to subscribe to these services.  


First I need to get a shape file of Europe that has the included countries open in ArcMap and save as an illustrator file, then compile the data into a spreadsheet so i can break them down into intervals (not sure which one).