I wanted to understand how music genres connect. Not a list. Not a playlist. A map.
So I scraped everynoise.com. 6,000+ genres with metadata, relationships, and top artists. Then I turned it into an interactive knowledge graph.
How it works
You start with almost nothing. A few nodes. Click one. its neighbors unfold. Click deeper. more connections appear. The graph grows as you explore it.
Every node is a genre. Every link is a relationship: subgenre of, similar to, regional variant, evolved from. The structure reveals things you'd never find by browsing Spotify.
Click any genre node and you hear a 30-second preview. Not a random track. the most representative sound of that genre according to the data.
The entry points
Five ways in. Search for a genre you know. Hit random and land somewhere unexpected. Filter by country to explore regional music. Filter by mood using color clusters from the original data. Or follow a curated story. "Roots of Electronic", "Blues to Hip Hop", "Guitar Evolution", "World Beats".
What I learned
The map of music is messier than anyone thinks. Genres don't branch neatly from parent to child. They merge, split, recombine, evolve in parallel across continents. The graph shows that. not as a theory but as a visual fact.
Built in a weekend. Vanilla JavaScript and D3. No frameworks. Just data and a force-directed layout that lets the structure speak for itself.