How It Works
Click for Tracks & Genres: Click any genre to see its tracks, or click any track to see its genre tags
Click For Connections: This is the ❤️ of Discovery. Click the link between "indie rock" and "electronic" to see tracks that bridge both worlds
Use two View modes: See genres as nodes (colored by track count) or tracks as nodes (colored by primary genre)
Select “polygons” of groupings: Press 's', draw a shape around a cluster of tracks, generate a playlist from your selection
Search and select: Find tracks by artist or title, then export to a YouTube or Spotify playlist for your listening pleasure 🦻
Notes from Building
Visualization turns passive data into active exploration. Instead of scrolling a list, you’re clicking, traversing, following connections. The data stops being something you read and becomes something you use.
Relationships reveal more than attributes. Clusters, outliers, and bridges emerge. You start seeing which tracks don't quite fit their assigned genre. Which usually means they're doing something interesting.
Selection is where it gets useful. The polygon selection encourages discovery over recognition. You’re not building playlists from what you already know. You’re selecting from what looks interesting. It introduces randomness, happy accidents, combinations you wouldn't intentionally choose.
The obvious ways of looking at data are now commoditized. They also tend to lead to expected outcomes. List-based dashboards have become table stakes. You ask predictable questions, you get predictable answers. You end up seeing what everyone else already sees.
In that sense, data visualization isn’t just for fun. It’s valuable. It changes how you explore, and more importantly, what you find. If the goal of Creative Differences is discovery, this gets you there in a completely different way.
If you apply that thinking to your own business… what data are you sitting on? And what insights are you missing because you’re only looking at it one way?
When the obvious ways of working with data are easy to replicate, the opportunity shifts. It’s not about having the data. It’s about finding insights your competitors haven’t thought to look for.
So how are you looking at your data?
