Technology giant Google has been tracking music uploads since it launched it’s scan and match feature for their Google Play Music app. The company scanned users’ local music libraries and made the songs it matched instantly available in the cloud. But Google has also been using the scanned libraries to plot the changes in music genres over the decades.
“We’re releasing a visualization to show which music has stood the test of time, and how genres and artists have risen and fallen in popularity. This visualization shows which albums from past eras are still in our music libraries today,” wrote Alison Cichowlas on Google Research’s blog.
While the digital visualization gives an overview of what most was popular since 1950 until today, visitor are able to click on each genre to dig a little bit deeper.
“By clicking on the Metal stripe, we can see the handoff from Classic Metal to Hair Metal to Alt Metal within the growth of the overall genre, as well as some of the most popular artists that composed each subgenre. The overall shape of each major genre shows when it hit the scene and when it retreated – for example, R&B has a long history of resurgences, but Electronica is a strictly recent phenomenon.”
Users will also be able to search for a particular artist to see the trajectory of their career, and as an example, will be able to see U2’s long-running reinvention and re-emergence from the ‘80s up to today, contrasted by one-hit-wonder Los del Río’s 1995 Macarena.
The interactive chart can be accessed at https://research.google.com/bigpicture/music/#
Charlie Fripp – Consumer Tech editor
