MusicMap Lets You Travel the World Without Breaking Lockdown

29 May 2020 - Press release

Take your ears on tour at MusicMap.Global

 

From Armenian pianists to Zambian rappers, MusicMap is the first music blog to feature music from every nation in the world...

The Covid-19 pandemic may have made international travel all but impossible, but one music site has now opened up routes to every country on the planet. MusicMap.Global, a blog that offers readers the chance to "discover the world, one track at a time", has been on a lockdown mission to share new music from around the world that might otherwise be overlooked, including Turkish psychedelia, Vietnamese rap, Ugandan footwork, Ecuadorian electronica and Indonesian gabber. 

A couple of months ago the MusicMap team realised they'd managed to cover almost all the world's sovereign states (as well as autonomous territories such as La Réunion and the Faroe Islands). A lockdown challenge was set to make MusicMap the first blog to feature every country in existence, resulting in articles on Vincy dancehall, Micronesian hip-hop and Sammarinese synthpop, as well as a Spotify playlist that takes listeners through every country featured, in alphabetical order from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. 

While some countries posed a significant challenge - North Korea's entry analyses music's role in the conflict with South Korea, while Vatican City is represented by a DJing priest from Portugal whose headphones have been blessed by the Pope - the challenge was recently completed after an artist was finally found from Monaco, a microstate where one in three residents is a millionaire. 

"The purpose of MusicMap has always been to celebrate artists making interesting music who might struggle to find an audience beyond, or even within, their national borders", explains editor Kier Wiater Carnihan. "Challenging ourselves to explore every single country while being unable to leave our actual houses meant discovering music we'd never have heard otherwise, making this a journey of discovery for ourselves as much as our readers."

MusicMap is the brainchild of several journalists, DJs and music supervisors associated with the international music consultancy Record-Play. Conceived as somewhere to share tracks discovered while researching worldwide music scenes for clients such as adidas, Google and British Airways, MusicMap began as a Tumblr blog in 2016 before evolving into its current incarnation. The map-based platform incorporates not just interviews, guest mixes and radio shows, but also regular live showcases at legendary Barcelona club Razzmatazz, where MusicMap's resident booker Titi Calor has hosted sets by Marseille producer Moesha 13, Canadian rapper Maya Ricci and cutting edge Hong Kong collective Absurd TRAX. 

While the Covid-19 pandemic has put a halt on their live showcases, MusicMap continues to keep quarantined readers entertained with everything from exclusive mixes and music documentary recommendations to a look at how independent record labels around the world are coping with the outbreak.

For more on Record-Play visit record-play.net.

Find MusicMap on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Mixcloud and SoundCloud.