Visualizing Billboard's Year-End Top 100, 2004 to now

See an interactive version of this map by clicking on the image.

Since August of 1958, Billboard has released a weekly chart ranking the top songs in America based on sales, radio play and digital streams on platforms like Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube (added to the count in 2018). At the end of the year, they release their top 100 songs of the year. Year-end charts since 2004 are available on their website.

Much has changed in music since 2004. A lot of this owes to the internet. With the advent of pirating and later streaming, users are not paying for songs like before. They are not beholden to the sounds of the radio -- they can listen to what they want, whenever, and experiment with more music like it. Streams are a new source of revenue, too, though each stream generates a small fraction of a record sale's revenue.

At the same time, the internet has given a platform to artists who might not have made it big in the old power structure.

Take "Old Town Road" by Lil Nas X. Lil Nas X posted the song as an indie rapper in 2019. The playful song went insanely viral on TikTok, fueling streams and sales. (Billboard's initial disqualification of this song from the country charts--as a rap country song--also created buzz that propelled this song upward.) The song became the longest-running Hot 100 #1 yet, staying there for 17 weeks.

Theoretically, artists' genres and geographies would matter less in the digital milieu. This map visualizes the origins and genres of musicians in Billboard's year-end chart from 2004 onward to see if that's true.

Looking at the data by over geography and time reveals interesting trends. In Georgia, for instance, hip-hop dominates in the Atlanta region, while country songs are most popular outside the city. Over time, more successful musicians have charted from Florida, which is likely a testament to the state’s growing population and cultural impact.

• Values are based on an artist's birthplace or a group's beginning city, not necessarily where they grew up or became famous.

• Coordinates are slightly randomized in popular cities to avoid overlap.

• Data sources: billboard.com year-end lists(scraped with BeautifulSoup), musicbrainz.org's API, Google search (scraped with Selenium)