Is it possible to look up the wikipedia page of a town, read about its history, and know what type of music you can expect to hear in its nightclubs? I think musical tastes say a lot about the area's culture and the population's personalities. I went to college in a city where electronic music was extremely popular (and essentially considered the "cool people music"), and my brother went to college in a city where the "cool people" listened to hip hop. If it was the other way around, we both would have been less happy. Surprisingly, his school has a larger percentage of white students than the one I went to. I find this contradictory, since hip hop is a historically black genre and I find most of the electronic music djs are white. I'm not ready to rule out demographics, of course, since you can find more k-pop in korea and j-pop in japan than anywhere else... but I just haven't figured it out yet.
Somewhat irrelevant information about me/why I'm curious about this: I'm in my early 20s and eventually will move to my own place, and I want to go somewhere where I can find people I connect with. One easy method of meeting people is participating in the nightlife, but I never fit in at places that play hip hop (which is extremely popular in the States, for those who don't live here or for those who do live here and are living under a rock). There are places in the country that are well-known electronic music havens like Las Vegas or Miami, or in Europe like Amsterdam, but I would like more options than that (I actually will become a dual citizen in a few years, so English-speaking places in Europe will be an option). I grew up in a place that has no nightlife and the songs played in restaurants only appeal to middle-aged people. My family has recently moved, but it's the same here, too... maybe worse (understandably. I'm living with my parents and they're not about to start partying in Vegas. I'm fine for now since I get to live for free xP but eventually things will have to change).
Hi there - I get the impression that a lot of what you're interested in here is about a genre of music that is more recent than 1997, and that perhaps you're interested less in the history of regionalism in genre popularity and more in finding the right cities now - if so you might get a better answer on /r/AskSocialScience rather than here.
But there definitely have been important regional faultlines in the US, music-wise - famously, the midwest had more conservative tastes, and for some time Bob Seger was a very popular singer in in the North Midwest, but had little profile nationally - music like Bob Seger's became known as 'heartland rock' because it was 'no nonsense' stuff popular in the midwest (where they have a tendency for more Anglophilia and more experimentalism on the coasts). The rise of national radio programming in the 1990s with networks like Clear Channel is commonly held to have snuffed out some of this variation between cities, but there are still definite regional variations in music taste, as these recent heat maps of people playing music of YouTube put together by the New York Times suggests.
As to the popularity of hip-hop in the US vs electronic music in Western music, there's an easy answer for that: hip-hop is historically and fundamentally an African-American music, as you allude to. It is a kind of music where there's a lot of emphasis on words, and a certain way of delivering those words ('flow') which is often reliant on either having an American accent or emulating one; unsurprisingly, hip-hop is on the whole less popular in Western Europe, where many people do not speak English (or who do not speak it that well) and are not African-American (though, plenty of local minority populations in Europe have seen a similarity between their situation and that of African-Americans, and gravitated to the music for that reason).
In terms of the history of electronic dance music in the US, Michaelangelo Matos' book The Underground Is Massive: How Electronic Dance Music Conquered America traces it from its 1980s origins in places like Detroit to its current capitalistic carnival, and that will definitely tell you where dance music has a long history and where the inroads it has made are more recent. Of course, dance music having a long history in a place is no guarantee that the history continues!