What was the world listening to? Music charts, 20 countries (1940–2025)
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I built this because I wanted to know what people in Japan were listening to the year I was born. That question spiraled: how does a hit in Rome compare to what was charting in Lagos the same year? How did sonic flavors propagate as streaming made musical influence travel faster than ever? 88mph is a playable map of music history: 230 charts across 20 countries, spanning 8 decades (1940–2025). Every song is playable via YouTube or Spotify. It's open source and I'd love help expanding it — there's a link to contribute charts for new countries and years. The goal is to crowdsource a complete sonic atlas of the world.
HN · launched Mar 10, 2026 · 114 upvotes (top 8%) · 0 views
Niche: music discovery and streaming platforms · 162 launches, 11 in the last 7 days ▼ -35% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Media & entertainment
- Analytics & BI
- B2C
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 162 launches in music discovery and streaming platforms →
Could you build this?
Yes It is a static content curation web application displaying historical music chart data alongside embedded music players.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: radio.garden (by region exploration), anthrology.site (US-centric, more granular across time), wikidata-extraction tool (random artist discovery)
Concerns raised: Required sign-up barrier to access, Data accuracy issues (wrong release dates, cross-century errors, unrelated genres), Regional chart representation incomplete (English vs French Canada, multilingual markets), Missing dates for some songs, No validation/checker to catch data errors before playlist compilation
Feature requests: Add automated validation comparing song release dates against playlist year, Separate charts for multilingual regions (French Canada, multilingual Belgium/Switzerland), Improve suggest feature with better country search/selection in correction interface
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 276 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #23 of 277 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 125 days after the earliest competitor.
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- Music Road · ph · 2026-10-08 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.49
- World Radio · ph · 2026-09-24 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.48
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