The other day I caught an article at like Gizmodo or the Verge or something talking about Google’s music timeline. It’s a pretty interesting chart, showing how much of a given year/decade’s zeitgeist was made up of specific musical genres.

Or at least that’s what I thought until I got to the FAQ section for the page. According to our data mining overlords, this table merely represents musical distribution among their users’ Google Play Music accounts. So now if someone has mistagged their music, and then other people also follow suit, you can have Willie Nelson releasing a metal album in the 1960s and it would show up in this dumb thing.

I really hoped this was the result of them mining through periodical information, which is vast, and building out trends based on record sales, news clippings, plus maybe Google Play Music data. In that case, you have some reinforcing of acts, and maybe Jazz doesn’t take up all of the 1950s. Maybe Proto-metal (Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, etc.) has overlaps with rock and blues, as it should.

Instead you have a Sinatra album as a definitive Jazz album. I know people are kind of pickled mush heads, but Sinatra was a big band/standards singer. My grandparents and their friends spent a lot of time imparting that on me.

Their metal chunk is just sad. Granted, I’m not the average person, but having the representative titles be one Zep album and then 90’s/early 2000’s nu-metal is ridiculous. No New Wave of British Heavy Metal at all, no 80’s hair extravaganza bands, hell I’d accept a Def Leppard album in there.

Oh also Less Than Jake is in the Reggae/Ska section. No mention of the Skatalites, the Specials, Desmond Dekker, Toots & the Maytals, or any other important band in the formation of the genre. Further reinforcing that this is less of a musical genre research tool and more of what the average person thinks of for these various genres. And it turns out the average person is misguided.

What’s really unfortunate about this whole tool is that, since people think of Google as the de facto authority on knowledge, at some point this may be used as a reference tool. It paints a very different picture of how music fit into culture, and paints a very limited picture of the genres themselves.

http://research.google.com/bigpicture/music/#