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Hacker News Show HN: What was the world listening to? Music charts, 20 countries (1940–2025)

A crowdsourced, open-source 'sonic atlas' of the world, allowing users to explore and compare music charts across decades and countries, with playable songs via YouTube or Spotify.

96
Traction Score
43
Discussions
Mar 13, 2026
Launch Date
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Product Positioning & Context

AI Executive Synthesis
A crowdsourced, open-source 'sonic atlas' of the world, allowing users to explore and compare music charts across decades and countries, with playable songs via YouTube or Spotify.
88mph, presented as a 'playable map of music history,' represents a compelling intersection of data visualization, cultural analytics, and open-source collaboration. The market implications are broad, touching educational technology, entertainment, and historical research. While not immediately a B2B SaaS product, its underlying architecture and data model hold significant value. For instance, the aggregated, time-series music chart data across 20 countries and 8 decades could be licensed for academic research, trend analysis platforms, or even integrated into AI models for music recommendation or generation. The ability to play songs directly via YouTube or Spotify highlights the power of API integration, creating a rich, interactive user experience from disparate data sources.

Developers would find this project particularly interesting due to its open-source nature, inviting contributions and fostering a community around a shared goal of building a 'complete sonic atlas.' The technical challenges of aggregating and normalizing vast amounts of historical chart data, ensuring accurate playback links, and designing an intuitive interactive map are substantial. This project serves as an excellent case study for building data-intensive applications that blend multiple external APIs with user-contributed content. It taps into the growing trend of 'edutainment,' where complex historical or cultural data is made accessible and engaging through interactive interfaces. Furthermore, it exemplifies the power of crowdsourcing to build comprehensive datasets that would be prohibitively expensive or time-consuming for a single entity to compile, representing a significant trend in data acquisition and enrichment for specialized domains.
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.
playable map 230 charts across 20 countries spanning 8 decades (1940–2025) playable via YouTube or Spotify open source crowdsource a complete sonic atlas

Community Voice & Feedback

delibae • Mar 15, 2026
Love this. Checked the Korea section - happy to help fill in gaps through the suggest feature if needed.
ghssds • Mar 14, 2026
I tried to look at the charts for Canada. The result may be representative for English Canada but Canada is really two markets. There is English Canada and French Canada, and both listen to very different music, with different charts. Belgium and Switzerland are probably the same.
etrvic • Mar 13, 2026
Hi! I noticed that the button open in spotify opens a premade spotify playlist, but the songs seem to be wrong. I also noticed that the covers on the website match the ones of the mismatched songs. Perhaps those songs only don’t exist on spotify? For refrence i opened the 2005 Japan playlist.
FuriouslyAdrift • Mar 13, 2026
This has a lot of overlap with Radiooooohttps://app.radiooooo.com/
DonsDiscountGas • Mar 13, 2026
I would love more granular data, like state or zip code. It would help settle a decade old (and zero stakes) dispute I have with a friend. I'm sure that's your top priority, so if you could get on that, that would be great
user_7832 • Mar 13, 2026
It's pretty cool! I cross "validated" with the charts of where I'm from and the results seem to be fairly accurate.One question/request: How did you get the data, and would it be possible to filter by language or genre?TBH I'm actually trying to chase which songs were popular when I was a kid - for example I distinctly remember Astronomia (Tony Iggy) being massive in the club/party "scene" (and even in malls I think!) - but these charts only give what everyone was listening to - so they're pop songs in the local language.
TrackerFF • Mar 13, 2026
It's a fun project, but I wish the years weren't locked to 5 year intervals.EDIT: Actually many years are missing, it seems. For Norway there's nothing between 2000 and 1985, but I guess that's how the charts are pulled?I also noticed that when you only have these 5 year jumps, certain genres are completely missing. Take US charts - Grunge is non-existent, as it had not yet hit the charts in 1990, and by 1995 it was over.
primaprashant • Mar 13, 2026
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.[1]: https://88mph.fm/in/1985
pilaf • Mar 13, 2026
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.1: https://88mph.fm/ar/2000
dewey • Mar 13, 2026
Other fun site in that niche (Since 2013), you can select the country + year and just "tune in": https://app.radiooooo.com/

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