Origin Map

Each line connects where an artist is from (orange) to a venue they are documented to have played (teal). The atomic unit is the edge (artist, origin) → (venue, date); a page exists for every artist and venue, and every fact carries its source and a confidence label.

Where the data comes from

• Seed set: artists whose Wikidata formation location (P740) or place of birth (P19) sits in the nine San Francisco Bay Area counties at a place with coordinates, and which carry a MusicBrainz artist ID (P434). Capped at 1,500 by a deterministic rule: bands (P740) first, then people (P19) by ascending QID.
• Performances: MusicBrainz Event records with a held at relationship to a Place, browsed per seed artist.
• Venue coordinates: from the MusicBrainz Place record where present (direct); otherwise resolved through the Wikidata item that backlinks the place via P1004 (resolved). If neither source states coordinates, the venue is not drawn — never guessed.
• Origin coordinates: from the Wikidata place item's P625. The MusicBrainz begin-area is shown separately on artist pages and never merged into the Wikidata origin.

Confidence labels

• direct — the source states the fact explicitly.
• resolved — joined across sources (e.g. a MusicBrainz area resolved to coordinates through its Wikidata backlink).
• uncertain — the source is ambiguous (e.g. multiple candidate origin places); shown, labeled, never silently picked clean.

Honesty rules

• No coordinate on this site is fabricated or interpolated. Unresolvable = not drawn, and counted on the gaps page.
• The "every artist has origin coordinates" property is true by construction, not discovery. The seed rule selects artists whose Wikidata origin place already carries coordinates, so the denominator is "Bay Area artists documented in Wikidata with a located origin and a MusicBrainz ID" (1577 found, 1500 kept under the cap) — not "Bay Area artists." Artists missing from Wikidata, lacking a formation/birth place, or placed somewhere unlocated never enter the atlas at all. That selection boundary is invisible on the map; this sentence is where it is stated.
• MusicBrainz event coverage is thin (that is the single biggest gap — numbers on gaps). Absence of a line is absence of a record, not evidence an artist never played somewhere.
• Facts from different sources live in different fields with their own provenance; they are never coalesced into one unattributed value.
• The records behind these rules are published on this site, verbatim: the Phase 0 probe report, the gate decision it forced, and the deploy record.

Licenses & attribution

• MusicBrainz core data: CC0.
• Wikidata: CC0.
• Base map data: © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL), tiles served by OpenFreeMap.
• Map rendering: MapLibre GL JS (BSD).

Data retrieved 2026-09-08 – 2026-09-08. Currently rendering 1972 edges between 1490 artist origins and 930 venues. This is Phase 1: a read-only atlas. No accounts, no tracking, no runtime API calls beyond map tiles.