Hey so remember how Google had that timeline of music popularity that was really just how their Google Music users identified varying bands? So Starland Vocal Band was doom metal from 2153? It looks like there’s a much better timeline called A.TRACK.TION that is pretty fun to scope out.

It has similar flows and distributions to the Google one, and you can delve into subgenres by double clicking major genres. From there you can double click a chunk and it’ll play some examples. It doesn’t dive into sub-sub-genres, so when you jump into Rock you’ll see Heavy Metal as one of the veins, but you won’t see Doom Metal, New Wave of British Heavy Metal, or Gothic Folk Metal or whatever.

I do like the additional sections, Serendipity and Influence. Serendipity will give you links to 20 of the 33,000-some songs they’ve currently identified, so you can scope out new stuff and see if maybe you really do like Florence and the Machine or Keith Sweat or something. Influence is a great web that shows which genres cross-pollinated or lead to others, with the same ability to drill down like the popularity chart.

This seems like a wicked interesting way to learn about music that might be new to you, in a much less judgmental manner than asking around. Because people are really opinionated about music, and this appears to not be. Opinionated.