We have seen many graphs before but playing with music consumption data is fun and probably endless. This new graph sums up almost 60 years of music sales classified by genres, and there is no real surprise there. However, it’s much more interesting to look at it on the website it originated from, A.Track.Tion, because the graph is interactive and it gives you the total sale per genre each year… you can follow the evolution of a genre, for example hip hop represented $1.15 billion of the sales in 1988, $9.5 billion in 2003, but only $2.49 billion in 2011, whereas electronic represented $1.19 billion of the sales in 1988, $2.17 in 2000, and $3.14 in 2001. Overall the biggest sales in music appeared to be in 1998 with more than $22 billion in total, all genres included, whereas they dropped around $13 billion in 2011.
The site has more to offer like a representation of all the genres and the influences they have on each other. Did you know that electronic music influenced 308 genres (it is the most influential of all), rock has an influence on 136 other genres, blues on 130, hip hop on 76 and pop just on 52, but this is just to name the most important ones. You can play with the different genres, all represented by a ball, you can rearrange them, but if you include all the genres that have ever existed, it becomes totally overwhelming. Go there, and play with the multicolor balls, push them around and rearrange them to discover which subgenre is influenced by which major genre. It’s a fun design, the whole thing looks like balloons or planets in orbits around each other, and by passing your mouse on each of these balls you can identify each genre. I got the picture below after working on it for a few minutes,.
There is even a function, ‘serendipity’, that randomly picks 20 of their 33560 database and lets you play them. Databases are fun to play with but everything is in the presentation.
