Say what you want about Michael Jackson, but there’s no denying the great effect he had on the music world. In honor of the pop king’s passing, practically half of The New York Times graphics department stayed up late last night building this graphic. It takes a look at his majesty’s Billboard rankings over his career compared to other popular music artists.
Decade after decade Jackson produced numerous hit albums. Click through time to see the mountains of each. Timeless.
To the man, to the legend, who no one will ever be able to replace:
[Thanks, Amanda]
This is pretty interesting too –
http://www.flickr.com/photos/lastfm/3661753675/
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Does anyone know what the grey/red coloring in the bottom section means?
The gray is Michael Jackson, the red is the other artist… right?
It’s not obvious until it suddenly becomes obvious- thanks.
Did you, like me, wonder how the NYT managed to create that graphic just hours after Jackson’s death? Turned out they used R (with postprocessing in Illustrator for Flash):
http://blog.revolution-computing.com/2009/06/nyt-charts-michael-jacksons-pop-hits.html
Amanda’s name was in the credit, so I just naturally assumed R was the starting point.
Checkout the the visualizer that billboard.com did. Very interesting. I couldn’t get a direct link
http://www.billboard.com