Here at Milwaukee Record, we employ a sentient machine known as the Great Job, Milwaukee Bot to keep track of the city’s many appearances on dopey online lists, or any time a national publication deigns to acknowledges our pathetic Midwest existence. Recently, the infernal machine brought us news that Rolling Stone liked Summerfest, The New York Times thought Milwaukee was a “cursed sports city,” and something about fireworks. Today, the bot reports that personal finance site ValuePenguin has ranked the Milwaukee metro area the 12th best place for music fans in the U.S. And if you can’t trust ValuePenguin to judge a city’s music scene, who can you trust? Great job, Milwaukee! beep-boop-boooooooo
Actually, there was quite a bit of methodology involved in ValuePenguin’s rankings. Fifteen different data points were organized under three categories: “The Band,” “The Crowd,” and “The Intangibles.” Under “The Band,” ValuePenguin took into account things like the number of musicians and singers in a city (per 1,000 people), sound recording studios, and record labels. “The Crowd” included data such as number of radio stations, record stores, bars, and top-rated venues, while “The Intangibles” rounded up truly random shit like average annual days with precipitation and bars’ average closing time. When the numbers were crunched, Milwaukee netted a 27 for “The Band,” 57 for “The Crowd,” and 48 for “The Intangibles” (lower numbers were better), landing it at number 12 on a list of 200.
Unsurprisingly, Nashville handily took the number 1 spot, followed by Urban Honolulu, Hawaii (!); Seattle, Washington; and Madison, Wisconsin (!!). Meanwhile, Appleton came in at number 44, while Green Bay popped up at number 102. So what does it all add up to? Is Milwaukee’s music-fan scene really better than the scenes found in Minneapolis (number 16), New York (number 26), and Los Angeles (number 27)? Is Madison better than all of them? You dare doubt the findings of ValuePenguin? Great job, Mil—hell, great job, Wisconsin! whiz-beep-whir