Updates

August 2024

It is common, during a cup of tea or walk around the block with the dogs, for future map ideas to be shared and discussed. Often they don’t go anywhere, but ‘A History of Modern Music’ managed to stick around. The initial idea was a history of all music but early on in a discussion between my brother and I we decided that a history of modern music was more appropriate.

Why only modern music? One of the downsides of our maps is that the longer the time period they cover, the less detail we can go into. Since music has existed since the Paleolithic period, the map would be more an anthropological history rather than a cultural history of music. That does then beg the question, if you’re only going to go so far back, how far back should we go?

We landed on beginning the map at 1920 with jazz, blues and swing, then taking the map through to the present day with pop, electronic and hip hop. Essentially that map will cover the last 100 years of music; from Louis Armstrong to Frank Sinatra, Etta James and Julie London, The Beatles, ACDC, Michael Jackson, Britney Spears, Tupac, Beyoncé to Taylor Swift.

There is a reasonably strong argument to be made to go back to the Classical Era, but we decided that creating a map that went from 1700 - 2024, where 2/3 is committed to one genre of music, wasn’t right for this map. Maybe we will have to do a history of classical music one day.

Aside from the intermingling of artists and genres, we have also decided to dedicate lines to themes like technology, world events, protest movements, as music is so often intertwined with what is happening in the zeitgeist.

— Matt