Genregraphy - Cartographic History of Music Genres

Genregraphy is an interactive map of music genres from 1950 to 2025. It groups genres by similarity and renders them as continents. The size and borders of each "country" change year by year based on release data. The system architecture runs on two ends. Python scripts scrape and normalize the historical release numbers offline. The browser then takes that dataset and uses D3.js to calculate the Voronoi polygon geometry on the fly, with Vue managing the timeline state. Scraping The underlying dataset comes from MusicBrainz and Last.fm , but clean timeline data for genre popularity was an absolute nightmare to extract. There is no single API endpoint for "all albums by genre per year." The data pipeline required a massive multi-step process. First, the script queries MusicBrainz for baseline releases ( I drink tea ). Then hits Last.fm to cross-reference tags and pull detailed descriptions ( I drink tea ). This forced me to deal with API rate limits, massive inconsistencies in tagging (