I built this because I wanted to know what people in Japan were listening to the year I was born. That question spiraled: how does a hit in Rome compare to what was charting in Lagos the same year? How did sonic flavors propagate as streaming made musical influence travel faster than ever? 88mph is a playable map of music history: 230 charts across 20 countries, spanning 8 decades (1940–2025). Every song is playable via YouTube or Spotify. It's open source and I'd love help expanding it — there's a link to contribute charts for new countries and years. The goal is to crowdsource a complete sonic atlas of the world.
I picked India and a random year, 1985 [1]. The number 3 song caught my eye cause it had the thumbnail of a famous movie that came out in 2004, although the correct song played. When I went to the linked Spotify playlist for that year, the included song at number 3 was wrong and linked to the song from the 2004 movie.
Not sure what the data source is, but needs a little bit of cleaning and validation. Not critiquing, this project is awesome, just giving a heads up.
Other fun site in that niche (Since 2013), you can select the country + year and just "tune in": https://app.radiooooo.com/
Very nice project! That browser tab is staying open for days.
I found a small mistake, the Argentina 2000 list [1] shows "Babasónicos - Ella usó mi cabeza como un revolver", but the actual song by Babasónicos (the one that plays) is titled "Cómo eran las cosas", and "Ella usó mi cabeza como un revolver" is a song by Soda Stereo.
Suggest a chart doesn't allow for selection of other countries not already present it seems like.
Otherwise, very nice project.
Very cool! One small UI grip: When I play a song the control at appears in the bottom of the page blocks the footer on the main page.
I assume you looked into automating the charts for new countries/years. What were the blockers for that?
Thanks! I'll fix that. Re charts: English-speaking countries were easy to scrape automatically, and recent charts for most countries were findable too. But older charts for non-English markets are a different story. For old Italian top 10s, for instance, I ended up relying on my own judgment and the fact that I speak the language. Trustable repos simply don't exist for a lot of that material. That's why I think crowdsourcing is the right call here, even if it's slower. And honestly, I like the idea of making this a collective exercise.
Great ! Great ! And fun ! But.. and you can skip destinations only by 5 years :(
Waiting for more countries (like, in Africa).. and more than first 10 ??
I recommend listening to DJ Earworm's mashup of the top song across the world [0] to hear a greater variety of countries, albeit for this or last year.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDZ78RbAdxU 11 minutes
In fairness to this post, they probably posted as much as they could get easily and consistently. I feel like the same situation reigns for country history in book shops. When I go to a used book store in Queens, New York, I'm not apt to find any books about Jaipur, India. But, if I were to go to Mumbai, India, I could probably find something. So, maybe we should prevail upon or sponsor people in Africa to volunteer their lists.
I see Kenya
You've got my upvote, nice
Oh la la! Oh la la!
Seriously... I found this very interesting, but for some country (i'm from Italy) maybe the charts are not so accurate (maybe yes, I'm not an expert ;-( ). Despite everything, very nice idea