Bands Incorporated

A few weeks ago, as I was doodling with some Companies House director network mapping code and simple Companies House chatbot ideas, I tweeted an example of Iron Maiden’s company structure based on co-director relationships. Depending on the original search is seeded, the maps may also includes elements of band members’ own personal holdings/interests. The following map, for example, is seeded just from the Iron Maiden LLP company number:

If you know anything about the band, you’ll know Bruce Dickinson’s aircraft interests make complete sense…

That graph is actually a bipartite graph – nodes are either directors or companies. We can easily generate a projection of the graph that replaces directors that link companies by edges that represent “common director” links between companies:

(The edges are actually weighted, so the greater the edge weight, the more directors there are in common between the linked companies.)

In today’s Guardian, I notice they’re running a story about Radiohead’s company structure, with a parallel online piece, Radiohead’s corporate empire: inside the band’s dollars and cents which shows how to get a story out of such a map, as well as how to re-present the original raw map to provide to a bit more spatial semantic structure to it:

(The story also digs into the financial reports from some of the companies.)

By way of comparison, here’s my raw map of Radiohead’s current company structure, generated from Companies House data seeded on the company number for Radiohead Trademark:

It’s easy enough to grab the data for other bands. So how about someone like The Who? If we look in the immediate vicinity of The Who Group, we see core interests:

But if we look for linkage to the next level of co-director links, we start to see other corporate groups that hold some at least one shared interest with the band members:

So what other bands incorporated in the UK might be worth mapping?