Explore the history of genres with Google’s Music Timeline.

Discussion of musical genres can often get contentious, confusing and — with the proliferation of micro-genres — quite silly. Still, we can all agree that the big ones — jazz, pop, rock — have been pretty useful over the last six decades.

Using aggregated data from Google Play Music, the tech giant has created a timeline of genres and artists that visualizes the ebb and flow of popularity. The interactive “map” shows how jazz gave way to pop and rock, which in turn have been stratified into more diverse genres and sub-genres.

Users can explore the timeline by artist, album or genre, but because it’s based only on Google Play Music data, it can be limited: drilling down into Dance/Electronica reveals a House sub-genre that begins with Deee-Lite, includes The Streets, and is sure to upset house fanatics. Despite that, check it out over at Google, where you can read more about it.