Weekly Viz 2020-05-25

Visualising 40 Years of Music Industry Sales

About Makeover Monday

MakeoverMonday is a social data project: “Each week we post a link to a chart, and its data, and then you rework the chart. Maybe you retell the story more effectively, or find a new story in the data. We’re curious to see the different approaches you all take. Whether it’s a simple bar chart or an elaborate infographic, we encourage everyone of all skills to partake. Together we can have broader conversations about and with data.”

Starting from Jan 08, 2018, I decided to put aside one hour on Monday weekly to create some visualization and find some insights from the data.

The datasets are published each week at: MakeoverMonday Datasets.

Makeover Monday 20200525

This week, we are looking at the US music industry sales in the past 40 days. The original viz is a very traditional and straightforward stacked area chart – I eamn, if I want to visualize this data, my first thought absolutely will be making a stacked area chart, as it carries the info of total sales and distribution.

My Visualization

So, I did make a stacked area chart, but only a small one on the top right for a general trend. Additionaly, inspired by this viz I saw on the discussion forum of data.world, I decided to make a similar radial chart.

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Please notice that all the visualizations are designed for desktop view, so it is recommended to view them on a desktop device.

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Insights

• There is a very clear trend of music format transition: LP/DF (1970s) -> Cassette (1980s) -> CD (1990 to 2010) -> Streaming;
• However, the overall sales is not every growing – its peak was around 2000, when CD dominated the market.

Follow this link to find more weekly vizzes :)