The History of Pop/Rock ???55-74

DB_Cooper

Some of you may dig this. There's a gentleman named Edward R. Tufte whose life's work is mastering the art of representing complex systems of data in easy-to-understand visual representations. In one of his books, he uses a hand-drawn graph of "marketing trends and stylistic patterns in the development of pop/rock music" from 1955-1974 as an exemplar. It's extremely dense, but I find it fascinating.It looks like this:You can download a .pdf I made of the graph to zoom in on it.Enjoy.

ToccuDomu

Thanks for that. I just finished reading "Beautiful Evidence." What book was this one in?

DB_Cooper

Visual Explanations.

ToccuDomu

good looks... thanks again. Thought about going to see mister when he comes through town this summer, but 4 bills is probably better spent elsewhere.

DB_Cooper

Detail of the very top of the graph from ???66-???69:

DrBorisQ

wow, this is incredible.

skel

good stuff
could be read in conjunction with Pete Frame's rock family trees of Zigzag fame
btw are there any funk/soul/jazz versions of these?

DB_Cooper

btw are there any funk/soul/jazz versions of these?

Not in that book, but it was used merely as an example???from what I understand, he didn't actually create the graph. I'll see what I can find.

nzshadow

cool.

thanks for the PDF

skel

yes indeed, great file, thanks for sharing.
I am trying to imagine how many times the guy must have redrafted the flow.
Blown up, it would make a great wallpaper/mural for a long room. I'm going to ponder that for my next DIY project.

DB_Cooper

I should also note that the vertical axis represents sales of pop/rock records in terms of dollar sales as a percentage of all music sales, and the horizontal axis represents time, with each vertical line representing one year.

Here's the bottom left of the graph: