Mapping the Song Every City is Listening To

What is the world listening to today? Rotation's Music Map offers a wonderfully simple way to explore that question, with a globe showing the songs currently charting in 166 countries and 174 cities.

Each place on the globe highlights a record that the rest of the world isn't playing. Click on a country or city and the record starts playing, turning the map into a kind of interactive global jukebox. You can also switch between different chart sources, including Spotify, Apple Music and Shazam, to see how the picture changes.

One of my favourite features is the Shuffle option. Rather than simply choosing a random country, it works like a loaded die: it picks a record, then a place, and explains why that particular combination has been selected. It is a nice way of discovering music from places you might otherwise never think to explore.

The map itself is beautifully presented. It uses a hand-drawn orthographic globe rendered on a 2D canvas, with the dark side of the Earth illuminated by NASA's Black Marble city lights. A small information strip above the globe displays the local time, weather, distance and time until the next sunrise, giving the whole thing the feel of a futuristic seatback display.

Also See

Radio Garden - discover and listen to radio stations from around the world

Radiooooo - to listen to music from anywhere in the world and from any decade going back to 1900.