Early music scholar and performer John Butt (I remember him as Kapelmeister at Cal) on how the Reformation changed...

Early music scholar and performer John Butt (I remember him as Kapelmeister at Cal) on how the Reformation changed Western music:

Why are we celebrating the 500th anniversary of the Reformation in music? Why does it have any enduring significance for the culture of western music?

For a start, the Protestant imperative to attend more to text in general and scripture in particular, led to the Catholic church’s own Reformation, the Counter Reformation, in the mid-16th century. It was in this environment that Palestrina became the mythologised father of a new Catholic musical tradition that, like those of the Protestants, purported to present the text more clearly by avoiding the excesses of polyphonic elaboration.

The Catholic church’s increased interest in music as the medium for text also drew it closer to humanist concerns for expression and effect – something that lay behind the development of madrigalian and operatic styles. And the interest in expression and emotional content also directly paralleled the new sense of intimate spirituality that characterised both the Catholic and Protestant reformations.

The art of music, which used to be the analogue of the proportions of heaven and the harmony of the entire cosmos, was increasingly brought down to earth, with the focus more on the human spirit and body. It would be simplistic to claim that all this was caused by the Reformation, but it is unlikely to have happened without the debates about faith, devotional practice and personal responsibility that the Reformation inaugurated.
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2017/aug/18/the-reformation-classical-musics-punk-moment

This pseudo-quantitative heat map analysis of YouTube music popularity by US county proves only one thing: my...

This pseudo-quantitative heat map analysis of YouTube music popularity by US county proves only one thing: my musical tastes are several sigmas outside the mean. Aside from oldie metal act Metallica, I couldn't hum a tune by any of these popular artists. 
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/08/07/upshot/music-fandom-maps.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=photo-spot-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0#future