I had never used this Google tool before – it didn’t even exist a few days ago – but if you are a bit obsessed by music, you may find it entertaining for a few minutes. And who isn’t a bit obsessed? This Music Timeline according to Google gives you a visual representation of the history of music from the 50s to the present time according to Google Play users. Google searches Google Play users’ libraries and categorizes the artists by genre, building this colorful and self-explanatory map, which can be explored almost endlessly.
If you click on a genre, let’s say rock, it will build another map with the different sub-genres of rock, but showing the irremediable decreasing popularity of the genre since the 80s. Rock’ n’ roll seems to be really dead according to this tool. Then try to click on one of these sub-genres, let’s say classic rock, and it will build a third map giving you a contribution of the different artists to the sub-genre. Ha! Nobody is making classic rock these days it seems! Of course if you click on an artist (I did click on Bruce Springsteen) it will show you the different albums and the period of their popularity/release. You can even do an individual research for an artist or an album and see an individual map: the Bruce of the 80s is still extremely popular, much more than the Bruce of the 90s, and there is not even a peak after 2010 despite a recent release… Surprising? Not really!
Metal is still relatively big, Punk isn’t really dead, and of course there is an explosion in the rap/hip hop and EDM world after the 90s, although Techno seems to die out. It’s weird as some artists seem to have some serious ups and downs, with huge ups corresponding to the release of an album, whereas it wasn’t happening to that extent in the 70-80s. Just compare the Arcade Fire map to that of David Bowie for example. Overall, the tool is very useful at showing the trends of the genres over the years.
But may be we have to be careful with these kinds of statistics for several reasons: First of all how many Google play users are out there? The Guardian writes that they represent a ‘pretty small subset’, and there are so many services these days (Rdio, Spotify,….) that it is difficult to know if they represent a good statistical sample of music lovers. Plus I don’t know what is in this Google library, are they albums, artists that are not there? And in this case they will not appear of course. Some old groups seem to be underrepresented despite being iconic ones, whereas some new young bands have a huge popularity. So in this way, it could be misleading. The Atlantic asked writer and record-label owner Douglas Wolk and he answered: ‘What it’s reflecting is what Google play users have in their personal libraries, which is different from what people listen to, which in turn is different from what people historically listen to’. Yeah, this is what I have thought it was at first, but it wasn’t making any sense since not even Google had statistics in the 50-60s! So enjoy the Google tool for what it is, but don’t take it too seriously.
