Billboard Music Evolution (2007 - 2017) by Jason Yee

How different are the songs from each year?

This is a data visualisation showing the evolution of Billboard's top-charting music between 2007 and 2017. This was originally a university assignment, which I further refined to create my submission entry.

The data is based on Billboard's Year-End charts from which I took the first 5 top charting songs of each year and collected data on the genre and BPM of each individual song. The overall design is meant to represent the music’s digital soundwaves.

Each bar represents a song, and the colours are assigned to each bar represent the genre(s) of each particular songs. The height of the bar is determined by the BPM of the song; if it is a slow song, the length of the bar is going to be long, and the opposite if the song is fast. The white space behind the bars is based on the average BPM of the top 5 songs of each year.

One of the most challenging parts in creating this data visualisation is condensing down the information into a visual medium. Some songs may have over 5 different genres, which also include sub-genres and fusion, which is hard to represent them all in the design. I decided to use the bulk of the information from a website called Discogs to categorise the genre of the songs.