This map is built from artist-relatedness data i.e. how much shared listenership there is between artists. This data is a framing of Spotify's "Fans Also Like."
5,322Artists in this snapshot
22Regions
92Scenes at highest level of granularity
2026-08-13Snapshot date
MonthlyRefresh cadence
LeidenCommunity-detection algorithm
How the map is built
1. Starting from somewhere
Like mapping a family tree, this map had to begin somewhere. The "seeds" were all semi-random and selected from touring artists in the American electronic music space. Experiments were run to ensure that if other seeds had been chosen, the same result would be reproduced. Some manually "tuning" was done so scenes land at sizes that are neither too small nor too big.
2. Expanding from the seeds
Each seed's "fans also like" neighbors were added by one hop only.
A hop in graph theory is the movement from one vertex (node) to another node (another artist) from a single edge.
3. Two graph views
An undirected view (who shares neighbors with whom) drives the Leiden community detection. A directed view (how many other artists cite this one i.e. in-degree) drives the region's "core."
4. Community detection
The community's are organized via a Leiden clustering. Two artists can land in the same scene either by pointing directly at each other, or by both pointing at some third artist (or beyond) they share in common . The sharing of neighbors is what pulls them together, even with no direct link between the two of them.
5. Two anchors per region/scene
The core (most affinity-central member) and the best-known member are reported for each region.
6. Layout
A force-directed layout positions artists so affinity pulls related artists together and also pushes regions apart from each other. Map positions are fixed in each monthly snapshot. Force-directed graph drawing comes from graphy theory, which is a branch of math.
Fans Nebula is not affiliated with Spotify. This is an independent project. It is not produced, endorsed, or reviewed by Spotify. Thank you, Spotify.
Refresh cadence
The map is refreshed monthly.
Because the graph itself can drift between snapshots (an artist can move scenes, a scene's best-known member can change), the exact scenes, regions, and best-known names shown on this site's example pages reflect the 2026-08-13 snapshot and may shift after the next refresh.
What's next
A monthly cadence opens the door to a future month-to-month time-lapse view of how scenes evolve. This isn't built yet, but would be nifty.
Cookies and data
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