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

DB_CooperDB_Cooper Manhatin' 7,823 Posts
edited March 2008 in Strut Central
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.

  Comments

  • ToccuDomuToccuDomu 225 Posts
    Thanks for that. I just finished reading "Beautiful Evidence." What book was this one in?
  • DB_CooperDB_Cooper Manhatin' 7,823 Posts
    Visual Explanations.


  • ToccuDomuToccuDomu 225 Posts
    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_CooperDB_Cooper Manhatin' 7,823 Posts
    Detail of the very top of the graph from ???66-???69:

  • DrBorisQDrBorisQ 298 Posts
    wow, this is incredible.
  • skelskel You can't cheat karma 5,033 Posts
    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_CooperDB_Cooper Manhatin' 7,823 Posts

    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.
  • nzshadownzshadow 5,518 Posts
    cool.

    thanks for the PDF
  • skelskel You can't cheat karma 5,033 Posts
    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_CooperDB_Cooper Manhatin' 7,823 Posts
    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:

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