100 Years of Rock Visualized

From Gospel to Grunge: 100 Years Of Rock in Less Than a Minute is an ambitious design project from ConcertHotels.com.  It’s an animated, interactive timeline design that let’s you click on any genre to highlight it’s specific history and play a sample of the appropriate music.

The history of rock music is pretty interesting. Everyone knows that it’s roots lie in genres like Gospel, but what about all the other genres?

How did Cowpunk come about? Or Indie Rock? Or Nu Metal?

These are the sorts of questions we ask ourselves here at Concert Hotels (oh, and other important topics like what we should have for lunch).

Curiosity piqued, we decided to trace the roots of the various rock genres, kinda like ‘Who do you think you are?’ but for rock music, and then visualize it.

We embarked upon what turned into a mammoth research task, the likes of which none of us have undertaken since college. But we stuck with it. We think it was worth the effort.

Ladies and gentlemen, we give you our Rock Time Machine - click here to journey through 100 years of rock in less than a minute.

And there’s more - while we were at it we thought it might be pretty cool to be able to hear a sample of each genre.

So turn your speakers up to 11 (or pop your headphones in if you’re the considerate type) - you never know, you might just find a new music genre to fall in love with.

Although music heritage isn’t an exact science, the color-coded flow arrows are easy to follow throughout the design.  However, they get more complicated at the bottom.  Apparently there hasn’t been any new music since Y2K?

Found on Fast Company