Overview
Since the 1920s, music has changed dramatically. The 20th century is actually often described as the “age of musical diversity”.
Nowadays streaming platforms dominate the industry, and allow us to bring together all these musical works.
• The first one shows the most popular track of each year since 1992, and includes track samples.
• The second visualization compares different interesting features of the tracks between two distinct years.
• The last one analyzes the popularity of main genres of music through time.
Timeline
What were the most popular songs throughout the years and how actually popular were they ? On the timeline below, we selected for each year the most popular song according to Spotify statistics.
Feel free to navigate on the timeline and listen to the samples.
• Scroll on the graph to zoom in or out. The more you zoom in, the more years will be visible.
• Navigate through the timeline with the horizontal scroll bar, or by dragging the cursor directly on the graph.
Obviously, people on Spotify today tend to listen to recent tracks, hence old songs appear as less popular than new ones.
According to you, what's the period of time that had the coolest popular tracks? To us it's obviously the 90's!
Year Comparator
Was music happier in the 1950s or in the 2000s? Was it easier to find music to dance along in the 1930s or in the 1980s?
In this next visualisation, you can find out exactly this!
Hover over the attribute names to get a short description of what they measure, and change the years dynamically using the 2 sliders below.
If needed, you can find more information on the features here.
It seems like music only got explicit very recently. Is that surprising to you?
Also, do you see how similar 1987 and 2008 look, even though there are 20 years apart?
Perhaps by using all the features we could gather a better picture, but the graph would be more crowded.
Note that the feature values (here in %) are calculated as the mean over the top tracks in each year.
Popular Genres
What did the generation of our great-grandparents listen to? What about our parents and grand-parents? When was the golden age of Jazz? When did Hip Hop emerge in the mainstream?
The following visualization gives answers to such questions by clearly depicting the evolution of musical tastes over the last century.
For instance, if we take a close look at what happens from 1955 to 1980, we can see that Jazz, R&B and Soul gradually give way to Rock and Pop. We can also situate the emergence of Hip Hop in the 90's.
• Choose whether you want the graph to be ordered or not by ticking the box.
• Choose which year's genres you want to look at using the slider. This will display a nice musical-wave-like transition.