I design discography art prints for a living, and I plan the studio in decades rather than quarters. Seventy artists are mapped so far, each one built from a spreadsheet of album-by-album musician credits that I research myself before a single line gets drawn. This piece is about why that slow, accumulating way of working is the point, and why I expect the maps to keep getting better rather than worse as I get older.
What a Guardian piece on ageing changed about how I plan the work
I read a piece in the Guardian about positive attitudes to ageing, citing a Yale study by Prof Becca Levy and Dr Martin Slade that followed more than 11,000 people aged 50 to 99 over 12 years. The finding that stopped me was this: 44% of participants actually improved on walking speed, memory and maths during the study, and those who started out with a positive attitude to ageing were significantly more likely to be in that improving group.
I am Mike Bell. I run mikebellmaps.com from East Sussex, drawing the studio discographies of artists such as The Beatles, David Bowie, Pink Floyd, Fleetwood Mac, Nick Cave and Johnny Marr into the visual grammar of the London Underground. As someone who cannot ever quite imagine retiring, financially or intellectually, that Yale finding read less like a wellness column and more like a working instruction.
How a discography art print is actually built
Every map starts as a spreadsheet, not a drawing. One column per studio album in chronological order, one row per credited musician, and the credit itself written out in the cell: the instrument, the track, the caveat where the sleeve gives one.
Only when that grid is complete does anything get plotted. Each album becomes a station. Each credited musician becomes a named line running through the albums they played on. Anyone who appears once becomes a branch line off a single station. Producers do not get a line unless they are also credited for playing something, which is why a name as large as a producer's can be absent while a cellist on one track is drawn in full.
What the grid will not give me is judgement. Whether a return after fourteen years is worth drawing as a break in the line or a continuous one, whether two names on the same sleeve are the same person spelled differently, whether a credit that only one source reports should go in at all. Those calls are where the experience lives, and they are the part that keeps improving.
Why discography art prints reward years of accumulated counting
A discography art print is not a quick brief. It is pattern recognition across decades of someone else's creative life, and the more records I have gone through credit by credit, the faster I see the shape in a new one.
Two examples from the sheets on my own desk. On the Foo Fighters and Nirvana map, Sonic Highways in 2014 carries 26 credited musicians, while the 1995 Foo Fighters debut carries two, because Dave Grohl played almost all of it himself. On the Fleetwood Mac map, Mick Fleetwood and John McVie are the only two names credited on all 19 albums, a span of 35 years, while almost everyone else arrives, leaves and in one case comes back long after the band assumed they had gone.
Neither of those is a fact you find by reading about a band. You find it by counting. Twenty-five-year-old me could not have made the maps I am making now, because he had not counted enough of them yet.
Ageism, and an audience that has been listening for forty years
Prof Srikanth, the geriatrician quoted in the Guardian piece, describes being asked when he was retiring the moment he turned 60, despite being at the peak of a research career. He calls ageism "one of the last socially acceptable prejudices". Design culture has its own version of this. It worships the new graduate, and cultural commentary often privileges the youngest voice in the room.
The people who buy my work run the other way. They tend to have been listening to one artist for thirty or forty years, and they notice immediately when a connection is right and when it is lazy. The David Bowie map is held in the permanent collection at the V&A David Bowie Centre, and the Bruce Springsteen map is held at the Bruce Springsteen Archives at Monmouth University in New Jersey. Billy Bragg, looking at his own map, said "Brilliant idea". None of that came from moving quickly.
What I am doing differently because of it
Three things, practically.
I am building the catalogue to compound. Seventy artist maps in, each new one sharpens my eye for the next, and the cross-map patterns only become visible once there are enough maps to compare. The session players who turn up on three different artists' maps are findings I could not have had at map number ten.
I am going deeper rather than faster. My audience already has the depth, so simplifying the research to speed up output would be the wrong trade in both directions.
And I am treating the Levy finding as a working principle. Prof Brian Draper, also quoted in the article, says the happiest stretch of life arrives later than most people assume, and that meaningful decline often comes later still. If that is the trajectory available, the question is not whether to keep going. It is what I can start now that will still be worth making in twenty years.
Buying art for the long haul, too
There is something quietly relevant in this for the prints themselves. A discography art print is not disposable décor. It is a Giclée on 230gsm archival, acid-free fine art paper, and it is designed to keep rewarding attention, because new connections surface the longer you live with it, in the way a good album does.
If there is an artist whose catalogue you have been carrying around for thirty years and want to see mapped properly, I would like to hear about it. You can see what exists so far in the music map collection, or read how to read a music map first. I am not going anywhere.
Questions I get asked about the research
How long does one discography map take to research?
Weeks rather than days, and the research takes far longer than the drawing. The spreadsheet has to be finished and checked before any line is plotted, because a single missed credit changes the shape of the finished map.
Are the maps made with AI?
No. Every map is deeply researched from sleeve credits, session archives and historical databases, and hand-drawn. That is the whole basis of the work, and it is why I can tell you which track a one-off credit came from.
What is not on the maps?
Live albums, compilations and soundtracks. The maps plot studio albums only, which is an editorial rule rather than an oversight, and it is the single thing worth knowing before you buy one.
Do you correct a map after it has been printed?
Yes. Collectors send in corrections, and several maps in the range have been revised because someone who knows a catalogue better than I do got in touch. That is the advantage of an audience that reads credits.