Analysis | The states that produce the most musicians, and more! (2024)

The many readers who asked us about the music capital of America were interested in a somewhat different question, however: Where do all those Music City or Big Easy or L.A. musicians come from? For that, our best bet is birthplace.

It’s not a perfect measure, but the Census Bureau doesn’t track where people grow up or go to school. So we’ll play the hand we’re dealt. And the cards show that, adjusting for population, D.C. produces more musicians than any state — though, as readers often point out, it more closely resembles dense urban counties than your typical state.

States that produce the most musicians include South Carolina, Tennessee and New York. But when you take all of them together, an interesting trend arises. The places in America that produce the most working musicians tend to be the states with the largest Black populations. It’s not always true, but it’s one of the few clues we have.

However, it doesn’t seem to be simply that Black Americans are more likely to become musicians — they’re about as well-represented in U.S. music as Whites. Men are almost always more likely than women to work as musicians, though among Black Americans that gender gap opens even wider. And while folks with more or higher education are more likely to work as musicians, Black Americans defy that trend and show little relationship between education and musical success.

So what’s going on? Perhaps there’s another factor we’re not measuring. Our first guess was that attendance at church, the real musical birthplace of many of the country’s most famous artists, might be related both to musical futures and to Black populations.

After all, we know from previous research that Lutheran churches deserve credit for the Midwest’s robust orchestra tradition. But when we compared musician birthplaces to 2014 church attendance data from the aptly named Pew Research Center, we saw no relationship.

Is it possible we’re seeing what some folks would call the Elvis Effect? Could growing up in proximity to America’s legendary Black musical traditions increase the odds you’ll succeed in music, regardless of race?

States with the most specialty license plates

The Old Line State loves license plates.

Maryland offers an exhausting 989 license plate designs, most notably the wildly popular Our Bay plates. Slightly less popular designs tout the American Sewing Guild, the Ocean City Parrothead Club and the Maryland Republican Party. Only one of each has been sold, total, in the past five years.

With twice as many plates as runners-up Texas and Pennsylvania, Maryland accounts for about 1 of every 8 of the 8,331 different plates currently listed on state sites, according to longtime friend of the column Jon Keegan, an investigative data reporter at the Markup. Keegan wrote code to collect the names and images of almost every state license plate for his stupendous newsletter, Beautiful Public Data. It took two months, and represents his best attempt to snapshot an ever-changing data set.

“I filed a bunch of public records requests and I had to scrape 51 different agency websites, each one built differently,” Keegan told us. “Indiana and Washington state had very nicely organized license plate lists, while New Hampshire and sadly my home state of Massachusetts did the worst, serving up low-res PDFs.”

Many of the plates are utilitarian, flagging farm trucks, trailers, low-speed vehicles or motorcycles. Others are as delightfully specific as Louisiana’s “Human Jukebox,” Florida’s “Trees are Cool” and Alaska’s “Iditarod Finisher.”

A few plates can be found almost anywhere. Every state has plates devoted to military veterans — often involving potent symbols such as gold stars, purple hearts and Pearl Harbor. Almost all have special plates for folks with disabilities, more than 40 have plates that mention cancer and almost as many have plates that mention radio, universities, prisoners of war, and children.

“Choose Life” and breast cancer awareness also have a presence in most states, as does Ducks Unlimited. The wetlands conservation organization has raised millions of dollars with its specialty plates, and Keegan has found that, in general, conservation-related plates such as Florida’s “Sea Turtle” and “Save the Manatee” and Texas’s “Horned Lizard” are consistently among the top sellers, raking in seven figures annually.

For the record, we tried our usual tricks to figure out what factors determine how many license plates your state offers or what themes they’re most likely to touch on, but as near as we can tell it’s as good as random. It’s not even really true that states with more registered vehicles offer more diverse plate options.

Why does Maryland — which is not the most populous state, or even the 17th-most-populous state — offer such a plate buffet? One clue is that many of the state’s plates are organization-specific. You can only order them with the help of, say, the Baltimore Rock Opera Society or the Frederick Saltwater Anglers, so Marylanders aren’t actually confronted with hundreds of choices each time they visit the Maryland Department of Transportation’s Motor Vehicle Administration, also known as the MVA.

Some states are aggressive about pruning the ranks of specialty plates, requiring that a minimum number be sold each year. Maryland does not. But we reckon the real culprit is a state law that, according to the MVA, says anyone can apply for a specialty plate as long as they get 25 organization members in Maryland to order it beforehand.

And honestly, in a little more than a year on this earth, we’re guessing the Department of Data has already come pretty close to shipping 25 membership cards to Maryland addresses. So, uh, look for a “Not That DoD” license plate coming to an MVA outlet near you — as soon as we figure out that whole nonprofit business.

Where do we make the most cat and dog food?

Apologies if you already knew this, but we’re living in the golden age of American pet food manufacturing. As the rest of the nation’s factory jobs have foundered, the dog-and-cat-food industry quietly built a nearly two-decade winning streak, having added jobs every year since 2004.

At least 35,000 Americans now work in dog-and-cat-food factories, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ redoubtable Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages. That means we have as many Americans making pet food as we do musical artists, landscape architects, real estate appraisers or vending machine operators. In case you were wondering.

For most of the time for which we have data, Missouri, longtime home of what is now Nestlé Purina PetCare, reigned as King of the Kibbles. But in 2022, Missouri was overtaken by cross-river rival Kansas, home of Hill’s Pet Nutrition (Science Diet) and factories for many other hound-hash heavyweights.

Of course, on a pound-for-pound basis, Kansas has pretty much always been top dog. But it’s not immediately clear that dog-and-cat-food factories should be measured on a per capita basis. What capita would we even use?

Hi! The Department of Data answers quantitative questions. Which states make the most human food? What about broiler chickens? Which causes of death have the widest gender gaps? Just ask!

If your question inspires a column, we’ll send an official Department of Data button and ID card. This week we’ll send buttons to readers J. Gray in Seattle, Eugene Hurley in Bloomington, Ind., and California commenter Keith Felch, who all asked about musicians.