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Click next to see key trends, or hover over the chart to explore

Methods

The artist of every song from every Hottest 100 from 1993 to 2012 was automatically assigned to the two most common genres returned from the Echo Nest API, the same service used by Spotify and Rdio. We also tried assigning genres on a per-song basis using last.fm's API, but found the user-generated genre tags to be unreliable. Once the list of songs with genres was compiled, duplicate genres (eg. alternative, alternative rock) were merged and genres were grouped by year and then converted to a percentage.

The streamgraph visualisation is based on Will Turman's D3 code.