Seattle Band Map Charts a Sprawling Music Scene

The Seattle Band Map, a fast-growing online project that works like an interactive game of “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” for the city’s robust music scene, started with a single circle.

Rachel Ratner, a longtime multi-instrument rocker, was telling friends about her collaborations with a handful of Seattle bands over the years. The explanation eventually merited diagramming on a pad of paper. She detailed how bands related to one another, what members they had in common, what shows they’d played together. When she finished she’d produced a spaghetti-like flowchart, replete with countless snaking lines and about 30 circles of names.

“I couldn’t believe how many bands were working together and had collaborated across Seattle,” Ratner, 30, told Wired.com in a phone interview. “It really surprised me.”

She was also shocked by the number of contributors who wanted to add bands to her work in progress. “I couldn’t believe how many people wanted to help,” she said.

Two weeks later, after attaching additional sheets of paper and squeezing names around each other like packages in a delivery truck, 800 bands sprawled across the patchwork pages, all joined by marker lines indicating collaborations, common members and shared gigs. Fellow musician Keith Whiteman converted the unwieldy diagram into an 8-foot-by-12-foot vinyl poster, which he and Ratner displayed at local art exhibits, where people continued to add bands and musicians.

“After we completely filled the poster and had to start taping sheets of paper around it … that’s pretty much when we knew we needed the web,” Ratner said, laughing.

They took the project online and the resulting website, which is still growing thanks to ongoing input by Seattle musicians and fans, has turned into a perfect example of the kind of sprawling, crowdsourced project that works perfectly online. By tapping into the knowledge of the crowd, Ratner and her friends are creating a sort of oral history of rock ‘n’ roll for their hometown that is quickly spreading beyond Seattle’s city limits.

Funded by a local grant for artists, Ratner and a few friends conceptualized the Seattle Band Mapwebsite. The vision was simple: Create an interactive map that allows anyone to submit “a connection” between bands. To build the site, Ratner leaned on the coding skills of University of Washington computer science stud Golf Sinteppadon.

The Seattle Band Map went live two weeks ago with only a few groups listed; today it includes more than 2,000.

Where it will stop is anyone’s guess. Originally, the project was to be community-based, but Ratner admitted that restricting the links to Seattle bands is impossible. Already there are obvious exceptions, like Velvet Revolver linked to Guns N’ Roses and Ten Minute Warning (but, oddly, not yet to Stone Temple Pilots).

The information architecture that shows the relationships among bands is evolving: Ratner and crew want to make the linkages more descriptive, such as a green line for “played a show together,” a red line for “shared a band member,” a yellow line for “collaborated on an album,” etc.

The color-coding of each band is still arbitrary as well, simply a random selection from a pre-chosen palette. As the submissions skyrocket, filters for reasonably viewing the mountains of data will become imperative.

Ratner and her friends are open to ideas, but more importantly, they need help coding, managing the submission queue and performing other tasks. The trippy diagram is still in the “this is really cool, but man does it need a lot of work” phase.

But like any band knows, it’s all about the crowd.