Music is six degrees. Measured.
MM5 holds the whole collaboration graph of recorded music — who played, produced, engineered, and wrote, with whom, when, and where — as objective fact: no ratings, no reviews, no recommendations. We ran three hundred exact breadth-first sweeps across all of it. The average distance between two musicians on Earth is 6.27 handshakes — exact, every pair counted. Every claim below is a link you can pull.
or pull a thread: King Crimson · Miles Davis · Quincy Jones · Ferenc Fricsay — a certified center of it all
485,657,850,681 pairs of musicians, each measured exactly: the most common distance between any two is six. The full census is The Width of the World.
Start at the loneliest edge of the graph — a singer from a 1922 Madrid revista — and watch one introduction reach the next. The wave crawls for a dozen steps through tiny rooms of two and three people, swallows 780,000 musicians in the four steps after it breaks out, and spends its last ten steps reaching the newest, loneliest corners: nineteen people stand at step 26.
The connected mainland holds 985,554 musicians — less than half of everyone with a collaboration on file. 1,024,726 musicians are complete solitaires, sharing their recordings with no other credited person, and the second-largest connected world in all of music holds 111 people. There is one mainland, and then there is everyone else.
Vicente Mauri Soler→ Eugenia Zúffoli→ José Palomera→ Luis Bori→ Luisa Wieden→ Galleguito→ Perlita Greco→ Faustino Bretaño→ Celia Gámez→ Alfonso Godá→ Francisco Alonso→ Coro de Bellas Artes→ Oralia Dominguez→ Ferenc Fricsay→ Eminem→ Nas→ AWITW→ Sergi Yaro→ Xlos→ Finn Studd→ Matthew McDermott→ Luke Wellik→ Thomas Waddington→ Ezra Beckett→ Jack Brough→ Zamm Kenoby→ Steve Hillier
Twenty-six real sessions, 1922 Madrid to now — the two worlds meet at Fricsay, joined by a bootleg Eminem/Dvořák mashup. The whole story →
Family trees
Every musician drawn as a thread flowing between the bands, sessions, and collaborations they shared — embedded on every page.
Find an artist →Six Degrees of 33s
Eighty-odd investigations of musical folklore against the whole database — the 27 Club counted, the record bin acquitted, the umlaut indicted.
Browse 6D33 →About
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