Back in the summer of 1983, David Bowie was enjoying a spell of incredible commercial success. His pop rock album Let's Dance had dropped in April of that year, spawning three singles that reached the top 15 in the U.S. Bowie was just one of numerous rock acts at the time wielding an enormous influence over popular music. Over 60% of the songs that reached the Billboard Hot 100 in 1983 can be categorized as some form of rock .

Fast forward to 2016 and David Bowie is once again on the charts. After he passed away in January, four of his hit records reemerged on the Hot 100 for a brief period. This time, however, Bowie's resurgence represents a nostalgia for a bygone era in music. Only five other rock musicians have broken into the Hot 100 at all this year (through August). Rock’s popularity has fallen dramatically in America, replaced by pop, rap, and country.

Rock's fall from grace is the impetus for this project on the evolution of music. We aim to look at the trends of music genres that have broken into the mainstream - the years that genres like rock or rap or country spent climbing onto America's radar, the golden era of each genre when it was adopted and enjoyed by the masses, and the decline older genres suffered as they fell out of favor. In this way, we hope to capture the "lifecycle" of major genres in American popular music.



Each week since 1958, Billboard magazine has released its Hot 100 chart - a list of the 100 most popular songs in the U.S. according to airplay, streams, and physical sales. We've paired each of the 27,000+ songs that have appeared on the Hot 100 with an appropriate genre. To determine a genre for each song, we leaned heavily on the Spotify API, with supplemental data from EveryNoise.com, AllMusic.com, and Wikipedia for songs missing from the streaming service. We think that this is the most complete dataset of Hot 100 songs matched to their respective genres publicly available.