21 Fascinating Graphs That Show How Pop Music Has Changed Over The Years

    Nickolay Lamm uses graphs in his project "Money, Love, And Sex Songs" to show how different words and phrases have been used in pop music from 1960 to the present.

    Here's how to read the graphs:

    The horizontal axis is the year of the song and the y-axis is the song's popularity according to Billboard's Year-End Hot 100 Singles. Each cell represents a song. The more red a song is, the more often that particular word appears appears in the song. For example, if a song has 5 "love" words and a total of 100 words in the entire song, that song is assigned 5% and a particular shade of color.

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