Earlier this week the folks at Google Research released an interesting Music Timeline depicting the changes in the popularity of various music genres from 1950 through today. The Music Timeline uses colored spaces to depict the increase and decrease of the popularity of each genre. Click on a genre to see the most popular albums of that genre over the last six decades. Popularity is calculated by how many Google Play users have the album in their libraries.

Applications for Education 
A couple of things came to mind as I explored the Music Timeline. First, the format of the timeline could be applied other areas in which you might want to visualize popularity over time. For example, students could develop timelines to depict the changes in popularity of political parties or politicians over time. Or they could develop a timeline to show changes in the popularity of various clothing styles.

The other thought I had while viewing the Music Timeline was that like From Gospel to Grunge: 100 Years of Rock that I shared a couple of weeks ago, Music Timeline could be a neat resource to include in a music appreciation course for a lesson about the history and evolution of American culture.