Now Playing: Google's Music Timeline

Make way for the Google Music timeline — a high-tech graph showing the rise, fall and introductions of musical genres, as well as a guide for understanding music history visually

Beginning in 1950, the timeline starts with jazz, showing which artists ruled the charts and even those one-hit wonders. After jazz, click on pop to see which other subcategories are included, like dance pop. Regardless of the genre you select, the seven most popular artists and albums of that genre sit just below the graph. The key to understanding the most popular genre at a certain time is the thickness of the stripe on the graph: The thicker the stripe, the more popular it was at the time. Read more...