Best U..S. Cities for Indie Record Shopping According To Me

Call me a dork but in your heart of hearts you KNOW this is interesting. After realizing that Boston and Cambridge - historically always considered great markets for indie music and stores - had only 1 and 3 participating Record Store Day locations while Seattle had 27, I felt compelled to perform a little exercise. Using the 2010 U.S. Census, I took the top 75 cities by population + 25 more semi-randomly selected from among the 76-275 most-populated. Then I looked up the participating stores on recordstoreday.com and divided the number of stores for each city into its population to get the population ratio per store. The idea is, a lower ratio of population per store makes a city more favorable to people who enjoy the brick-and-mortar indie record shop experience. For example, I'd rather live in a city with an indie record store for every 50,000 residents than one with a store for every half-million.

We have a champion. Congratulations, Pittsburgh, with a Record Store Day participating store for every 21,857 people you are theoretically the most indie record shop-friendly city in this hard land. Also, here's to you, Seattle, Minneapolis, Berkeley, and Cambridge: welcome to the Top Five. Salt Lake City, Ann Arbor, Madison, St. Louie and Portlandia... not too shabby, homeys, you cracked the Top Ten.

Dishonorable Mention goes to Jacksonville, Fresno, Anaheim, Newark (NJ) and Henderson (NV) - all among the 75 most-populated cities in the U.S. and not a single RSD location between you. Shame on you. And YOU, San Antone! You can't hide in the back! As the 7th most-populated city with the 94th best RSD ratio, you officially suck. Maybe all your records are in the basement of the Alamo. Have you considered seceding?

For those keeping score at home, here are the stats: