The italian music superdiversity

Globalization can lead to a growing standardization of musical contents. Using a cross-service multi-level dataset we investigate the actual Italian music scene. The investigation highlights the musical Italian superdiversity both individually analyzing the geographical and lexical dimensions and combining them. Using different kinds of features over the geographical dimension leads to two similar, comparable and coherent results, confirming the strong and essential correlation between melodies and lyrics. The profiles identified are markedly distinct one from another with respect to sentiment, lexicon, and melodic features. Through a novel application of a sentiment spreading algorithm and songs’ melodic features, we are able to highlight discriminant characteristics that violate the standard regional political boundaries, reconfiguring them following the actual musical communicative practices.