Popularity of genres today, based on how many Google Play Music users have those artists or albums in their libraries. It takes a second to wrap your head around the temporal aspects of it – it’s basically looking at music that is in most people’s playlists now and telling you when it was made. It’s hard to tell if this is thus revealed preference of how good each genre was at each time, how popular, how enduring, or how old people are (whose music collections go back further?). Ok, I’m not sure exactly what this means. Haha!

Each stripe on the graph represents a genre; the thickness of the stripe tells you roughly the popularity of music released in a given year in that genre. (For example, the "jazz" stripe is thick in the 1950s since many users’ libraries contain jazz albums released in the ’50s.) Click on the stripes to zoom into more specialized genres.

Muzak used to try to systematically lift your mood to encourage shopping – basically they were shopping DJs. I have several of the old albums – pretty funny stuff. Here’s a great article about the history of Muzak.