Dublin city, along with Oslo and Atlanta, have been ranked as the world’s top hipster cities, based on music choice.

Ultra-cool hipsters in Seattle, New York and London must be quaking in their vintage boots after research from University College Dublin students reveal that Dublin’s youths are more fashionable.

In case you are in any doubt , hipsters, according to UrbanSlang dictionary, are a “subculture of men and women typically in their 20s and 30s that value independent thinking, counter-culture, progressive politics, an appreciation of art and indie-rock, creativity, intelligence, and witty banter”.

Another definition says “Definitions are too mainstream. Hipsters can't be defined because then they'd fit in a category, and thus be too mainstream.”

I’m sure you can see a pattern here.

Although the term “hipster” has various connotations, it’s loosely taken to mean people who listen to indie music and are fashionable by being unfashionable. They are stereotypically mustached (men only, of course), wearing skinny jeans, cardigans, porkpie hats, sporting vintage music devices, such as analogue walkmen and record players, and generally have an attraction to affectations such as pipe smoking or wearing glasses while not needing to.

Focusing on the music preferences of hipsters, the UCD researchers Prof Padraig Cunningham and Conrad Lee have published a study “The Geographic Flow of Music” that ranks Dublin along with Oslo and Atlanta as one of the world's biggest cities for hipsters.

Their scientific data is based on the listening information from Last.fm. In terms of all the music listened to on the site, including indie, hip-hop, rock and classic rock, Stockholm is the most active, followed by Hamburg, Dublin, Birmingham, Leeds, Paris and Berlin.

In terms of the amount of indie music listened to in Europe, Dublin comes third, behind Paris and Oslo, and is followed by Madrid and Milan, according to the report on SiliconRepublic.

The researched studied this data spread over three years, coming out of 200 cities. They matched song choices with geographic location. They studied similarities between US, Canadian and European cities also.

Here’s a graph of their findings.