How the map is built
ZERONOISE turns published tracklists into a map. This page says what goes in, how songs are placed and linked, and what the map cannot tell you.
What goes in
Published tracklists of recorded DJ mixes and radio shows: for each mix, the songs in the order they were played. Today that is 1,439,859 songs. A song counts once in a mix, however many times it is listed there, and the number of mixes a song appears in is its play count.
Versions and remixes stay separate songs, and artist aliases are not merged.
How songs are linked
Two songs are linked when they were played one or two places apart in the same mix. The strength of a link is the number of different mixes that did it, divided by the geometric mean of the two songs’ play counts, so a link between two rarities can outweigh one that a heavily played record has with everything. Repeats within a mix do not add up. Each song keeps its two strongest links, in either direction, and songs by the same artist are chained together.
A link means people played the songs close together. It does not mean they sound alike, or that they mix in key or at the same tempo.
The 50,000 songs on the map
The catalog is too large to draw. The map holds 50,000 songs, grown outward along real links from the busiest songs of each style until the map is full, so every song on it is connected to the web. They are not simply the most played songs: the strongest links of a very popular record point into the long tail, so the top of the catalog is mostly unconnected. Every other song can still be found by search and opens in a panel with the mixes it was played in.
The wheel
The map is a wheel. Each sector is one of the 16 most common Discogs styles, plus a sector for the rest, and styles that are mixed together sit side by side. Inside a sector, songs sit on four rings by play count, the busiest innermost, around an empty middle that the links cross. An artist with several songs on the map gets a fan.
The positions are computed once, and the wheel is loosened on purpose with a fixed random seed, so exact distances mean little. The links carry the meaning, not the geometry.
Genres, styles and years
Genres, styles and first release years come from Discogs, which publishes its monthly data dumps under CC0. Each song is matched to Discogs releases by normalised artist and title. 1,285,074 of the 1,439,859 songs have Discogs data: 59% match the exact recording, 8% match the same title in another version, 23% get the styles their artist is usually filed under (the song panel says so) and 11% match nothing. 840,696 songs have a first release year. The year comes from exact matches only.
What the map cannot tell you
- It shows what got a published tracklist, not everything that was played. Coverage differs between channels and between years.
- A play count is the number of mixes in this catalog that list the song. It is not sales or streams.
- A link is a fact about sequencing, not a similarity score.
- Genre, style and year are matched automatically and are wrong for some songs.
No recommender
Every song, link and count comes from the data described here. Nothing is personalised, and no model picks what you see: filters and search only narrow it.
More: questions and answers, stories from the numbers, data sources and credits.