So there are millions of songs on the market, and I could expect an endless diversity if i was able to spy on the millions of people who listen to music on Facebook for example. I couldn’t be more wrong, this uniformity, this total lack of individuality and originality is so depressing that I am about to lose any little faith in humanity I still had!
Facebook and San Francisco’s Stamen design firm have created a visualization showing the top 3 songs played through apps integrated with Facebook. The chart you are able to watch in the video below actually shows, at any given moment, the 3 songs the most played all over the US map. The height of the peak of course determines the popularity of the song, and the ‘landscape’ is changing along the period of 90 day during which data were collected.
The winner is undoubtedly ‘Thrift Shop’ (in blue), the Macklemore and Ryan Lewis’ terrible rap song, look at this! The blue peaks are all over the map from the west coast to the east coast, all the time! Dispiriting! The rest basically features the worst (to me) of the American music scene, The Lumineers’ ‘Ho Hey’ is pretty strong, followed by Swedish House Mafia’s ‘Don’t You Worry Child’. Even when Imagine Dragons’ ‘Radioactive’ or Britney Spears and will.i.am’s ‘Scream & Shout’ make an apparition, ‘Thrift Shop’ is still uniformly number one. Some other notable apparitions, Bruno Mars’ ‘When I Was Your Man’ and ‘Harlem Shake’, but Americans seem to never get enough of that awful ‘Thrift Shop’ rap song. And toward the end, horror, another Macklemore and Ryan Lewis’ song ‘Can’t Hold Us’ is showing up! If anything, this tells a lot about the lack of imagination of the American audience, but I am sure this is not limited to the US.