This is so cool. Click here to go to the interactive map from the Every Noise At Once project, and click on any genre you want to hear a sample from a song that falls within that genre. For so long I had no idea what the difference between the 1000 kinds of metal were! This is quite helpful. If you hit the ‘scan’ button it’ll randomly play songs from throughout the map, try it.

It’s interesting to see which artists and songs fit into which genre. It’s a given that Dylan would represent ‘folk’ and Nick Drake ‘british folk’, but bands like Modest Mouse (lo-fi), Cat Power (slow core?! lol), Yeah Yeah Yeahs (indie rock) and Bruce Springsteen (roots rock) all could have been given other genres. Also surprised that The Beatles were not the ‘british invasion’ song, and that Nirvana played for ‘alternative rock’ rather than ‘grunge.’

It’s not quite every genre of all time (people keep making new ones up daily – Cold Specks will put ‘doom soul’ on that map!), but according to the site it is a work in progress they continue to update – definitely something worth bookmarking.

How awesome is this?! To celebrate the return of David Bowie, Castle Cover made this incredible interactive timeline which you activate on their website by literally dropping the needle on the record, and it takes you through each period of his career both style wise (as seen above) as well as musically – but only if you are somewhere that has access to Spotify – AKA NOT CANADA! Boo.

But still, it’s awesome to go through even without the music sync. It is a detailed and fascinating look into one of the most creative and diverse music careers in human history. Just looking at the way he changed his personas over time and influenced fashion is mind blowing enough on its own.

What was your favourite Bowie period? I have to be boring and go with Ziggy, but Berlin also ruled.

The 50th anniversary of the Beatles debut album, Please Please Me, just passed, and in honour of it, Pop Chart Lab (whose work I’ve featured before) made these incredible prints (click on each image to make it larger) you can buy, that detail who played what on every Beatles song ever released. It’s quite a feat, considering how complex their instrumentation became as the years went on.

I think Volume III is my favourite, both for the songs featured and their look during that period.

This infographic from Crazyegg makes some great points about the value of portable content. Almost makes me think about starting a podcast (but listening to my voice in interviews is painful enough for me, so that’s not likely to happen anytime soon).

Thought you guys might enjoy this infographic from Sonos on the history of radio (click to make it larger).

It’s from 2011 so it doesn’t have completely up to date information, but it’s still fascinating to see how much things have changed. Rdio is the radio of today. We make our own stations from our own collection. I still think there is some (if only nostalgic) value in traditional radio, but like print media, its days are numbered.

Can you imagine our world today if the radio had never been invented? How incredibly depressing.