Musicmap: The Family Tree of Every Music Genre

Musicmap is a gigantic interactive family tree of popular music. Every genre you’ve heard of and roughly two hundred you haven’t are laid out on one enormous canvas, grouped into larger families, connected by lines that show who influenced whom, and stacked roughly by era so you can watch the whole century unfold. Click any genre and you get a description plus audio examples. It is the best two hours you can spend arguing with a website.

What is Musicmap?

Musicmap answers a question every music nerd has asked and nobody has ever answered well: where did this genre actually come from?

Instead of a list, it gives you a map. Genres sit in visual clusters, the big families that everything else grew out of, and thin lines run between them showing lineage and cross-pollination. Follow the wires and you can trace a path from early blues through rock and roll, through punk, out into hardcore and post-punk and everything they spawned. Or start at the weird end and reverse-engineer where your favorite obscure microgenre got its DNA.

It’s the work of Belgian designer Kwinten Crauwels, built over years, and it shows. Nothing about it feels automated. Somebody made every one of those decisions on purpose, and you can tell, because you will disagree with some of them and that is part of the fun.

What can you do on Musicmap?

• Zoom around the whole map. Start wide to see the shape of the thing, then zoom into a corner and get lost. The scale is genuinely startling the first time.
• Click any genre for its story. Each one opens into a proper written explanation: where it came from, what defines it, what it turned into.
• Actually hear it. Audio examples are attached to genres, so a name you’ve only ever read becomes a sound in about four seconds.
• Trace the connections. The lines are the real content. Following one backwards is how you discover that two styles you thought were unrelated share a grandparent.
• Find your next rabbit hole. Nothing generates a to-listen list faster than seeing a genre you’ve never heard of sitting one node away from one you love.

Tips to get the most out of it

Use a big screen. This is a cartography site, and cartography on a phone is a sad, pinched experience. Desktop or bust.

Pick a genre you know cold and start there. Musicmap is overwhelming if you begin at the top. Find something you already understand deeply, then walk outward one connection at a time. The map teaches you by contrast with what you already know.

Follow the lines backwards, not forwards. Everyone traces influence forward into the present. Going backwards is where the surprises live, you find the jazz record hiding under the electronic subgenre.

Play the example before you read the description. Guess what the genre is from the sound, then read. You’ll remember it far better than if you read first.

Treat the taxonomy as an opinion. Genre boundaries are arguments, not facts. Musicmap has a point of view. Disagreeing with it out loud, ideally to a friend, is the correct way to use this site.

If you like Musicmap, also try…

• Every Noise at Once: the algorithmic cousin: a scatterplot of thousands of genres you can click to hear.
• Radiooooo: pick a country and a decade and hear what the music sounded like there.
• Information Is Beautiful: more gorgeous, obsessive data visualization.
• Scale of the Universe: the same “zoom out and see how it all connects” feeling, applied to physics.

Plenty more rabbit holes in Music & Audio and Data & Research.

Open Musicmap, find the genre you love most, and see what it’s related to. You will not close the tab quickly.