Change log — Sound Travels

30 September 2026

New About the data. A new page explains where each of the three charts comes from, how often it changes and what plays when you pick a song. The credit under the chart is back to a single short line that links to it.
New A page for every country. Each country now has a page of its own listing what is trending there today, marking the songs that chart nowhere else, with a button to open it on the map and links to every other country — so someone searching for what a country is listening to can find it. Links made with Copy link still open straight on the map, as before.
Changed Easier to find, and better when shared. The page's title now says what it is — trending music in every country, on one map — and a link to the map pasted into a chat or a social post now shows its picture of the world wherever it is shared. Search engines are also told what the site is and which pages it has.
Changed The credit under the chart, and at the foot of this page, now names all three sources — YouTube, Apple Music and Deezer — with a link to each, whichever one the map is showing.
New Apple Music and Deezer charts. A new picker at the start of the top bar switches the whole map between YouTube's trending videos, the songs most played on Apple Music today, and each country's Deezer chart for the week. YouTube's list rewards whatever is rising fastest, so it can look nothing like what a country actually plays; the other two count real listening. The country you had open stays open if the new chart covers it. This came from your feedback on the r/dataisbeautiful thread, where people said their country's chart didn't look right — Belgium among them.
New Cover art and previews. Apple Music and Deezer songs show their album cover, and picking one opens that service's own player, which plays a 30-second preview to anyone and the whole song to a subscriber signed in to it. Copied links remember which charts you were looking at.
New Let's connect and chat. A link to @mikogptsidequests on Instagram sits at the end of the top bar — the glyph alone on a narrow screen.
Changed What's new is now the Change log. Old links to it still land here.

29 September 2026

Changed The map loads half as much. The world's outlines were the biggest thing the page downloaded; they now take about half the bytes, with every country drawn exactly as before. Dragging, scrolling and pinching the map also do less work on each frame, so panning and zooming stay smooth on a slower phone.
Changed The site now uses Google Analytics to count visits and what visitors pick — a country, a song, a sound, Surprise me, or sharing a link. This loads Google's analytics script, which can set cookies, on the published site only.

27 September 2026

Changed The Feedback link is gone from the top bar for now.
Changed YouTube is credited under the chart, with links to the YouTube Terms of Service and the Google Privacy Policy that cover playing a video, instead of in the site's name.

26 September 2026

Changed The map says both answers now. It used to run from pale, for a country with nothing charting only there, to dark red. That made a country like the USA, whose songs chart all over the world, look as if it had no music of its own. Now the map runs like a tide: deep sea for a chart the world shares, through jade for a mix, to gold for songs charting nowhere else. Chart positions, once you pick a song, are shown in ink instead of blue.
Changed A new name: Sound Travels. The old one named a river and said nothing about music. This one asks the question the map answers: how far a song goes. For most, not past the border.
New Songs land on the map. Pick a song and a dot lands on every country charting it, coloured by where it placed there, with the names and chart positions written on the map. The map moves to frame whatever you pick — a country with its neighbours around it, a song with every country it has reached.
Changed A new look for the map. Stone instead of a pale blue sea, a resting map shaded all the way to a deep red, chart positions in blue so the two can never be confused, and one big number over the corner of the map saying what it is showing. Antarctica is gone, which gives every other country more room. On a wide screen the chart now sits in a column beside the map.
Fixed Picking Russia now zooms in on it. Its far-eastern tip is drawn on the other side of the map, beside Alaska, so the camera used to try to frame the whole width of the world and could not get closer.

11 September 2026

Fixed On a phone, the top bar no longer slides off the screen or collapses to nothing when the page is reopened from a closed tab or loaded from the browser's cache — which left no way to pick a country without rotating the phone.

9 September 2026

Changed Share cards say it in words. A pasted link now arrives with a card carrying the Sound Travels name, the country, and up to three songs charting there and nowhere else on Earth — with a line saying how much of that country's chart is its own. It replaces a world map that looked the same for every country, and then a flag, which was at least different each time but said nothing about the music. Titles written in scripts the card's typeface cannot set are left off the image and still appear in the link's own text, where they render properly.
Changed The map arrives sooner. The world's geometry is the biggest thing the page loads, and the browser was not asking for it until it had fetched and read two other rounds of files first. It is requested up front now, along with everything else — about a fifth faster to a drawn map on a slow connection, and more the slower it gets.

8 September 2026

New Shared links now arrive with a picture and something to say. Pasted into a chat, a link used to unfurl as a bare URL — the same title and no image whichever country it pointed at. Every country now has a card of its own: a map with that country in red, and a line saying how much of what it is playing charts nowhere else. Copy link hands over that link, and it still opens on exactly the country, song and sound you were looking at.
Changed One sound picker, in place of the local-only switch. Pick a kind of music next to where you pick a country, and it narrows both the chart you are looking at and what Surprise me reaches for. It only ever offers sounds something is actually charting today, and it travels in the link like everything else. The sound beside whatever is playing now sets the picker rather than quietly doing its own thing.
Changed Local only is gone. Every card already says how many countries chart that song, and marks the ones charting nowhere else — the switch was asking a question the list had answered. The row of sound chips on the landing page is gone too, into the picker. Two fewer controls, and one fewer way to end up in a mode you did not know you were in.
New Surprise me. One press plays a song charting in exactly one country, chosen from the half of the world furthest from you. Which half is worked out from your browser's own time zone — a continent, not a location, with no permission prompt and nothing sent anywhere — so a listener in Chicago is sent to Jakarta rather than to Toronto. It will not hand you the same song twice, or the same country twice in a row. The button lives on the map's own label, and shrinks to a single glyph once a country is named.
New Songs now carry a sound. YouTube classifies most music videos by genre, and Sound Travels now reads it: the sound sits beside whatever is playing, and pressing it plays something of that sound from a different country. On the landing page the same row offers the handful of sounds the world is actually charting today — hip hop, electronic, reggae, whatever it happens to be — as a way in that is not a country. It replaces the row of countries that used to sit there.
Changed The map now says something before you click it. Every country is shaded by how much of its chart is its own — pale where a country is playing the rest of the world's music, dark where it is playing its own. That turned out to be the thing worth showing: most of what charts anywhere charts in exactly one country, and the map makes that visible in one look rather than after twenty clicks. The page leads with the number, counted live from the charts on screen.
New Local only. A switch in the controls that hides the songs charting all over the world and leaves the ones that are not. Nearly half of every chart position on Earth is a song charting in exactly one country, and that half is the reason to look at a map at all.
New Every video now says how many countries have it in their chart, and the ones charting nowhere else are marked Only here.
New Listens like. Under the chart, the countries playing the same songs as the one you picked — ranked by how unusual the songs they share are, so a country that shares one rare track ranks above one that shares three worldwide hits.
Changed Charts run ten deep instead of five. Six countries cannot fill ten — Iceland charts exactly one music video — so the heading counts what is actually there.
New Links now describe what you are looking at, so a country or a song can be sent to someone: the address bar follows every selection, and Copy link sits in the label on the map. A shared video opens paused rather than starting itself.
New Pinch to zoom the map on a phone or tablet.
Fixed Reset view looked broken. It always worked, but the map could hardly be moved in the first place — there was no way to zoom by touch — so the button usually had nothing to do and said nothing about it. It is now greyed out until the map has actually been moved.
Changed On a phone, tapping a video opens it full width, the chart became a row you swipe through, and the player no longer covers the map while the countries light up.
New Feedback. Opens an email with what you were looking at already filled in — the country, the song, the exact link, and how old the charts were. Nothing is sent from the page: your own mail client opens with the text there for you to read, edit or delete, and you decide whether to send it. No GitHub account needed, and no repository access either.
Changed The top bar no longer wears a permanent Live badge. It only ever said the same word, in the loudest colour on the page, while the line that actually changes — how old the charts are — was the quiet one and was missing on phones entirely. That line now stays, shortened to fit, and a badge appears only when the data is not real.

31 August 2026

Changed The whole interface was rebuilt on a design system: one light theme, a single-hue scale for chart positions rather than a rainbow, and text and controls that meet WCAG AA contrast.
New Choosing a video plays it in the corner of the map, so it is running while the countries charting it stay lit.
New Clicking a country on the map now shows plainly which one is selected, with an outline on the shape and its name above the map. Countries too small to click have a dot instead.
Changed The name is set as text rather than an image, so it stays sharp at any size.
Changed The map itself loads about half the data it used to, without losing a country.
Fixed A build with no YouTube key publishes the map and says there are no charts yet, instead of failing and leaving nothing at all.

30 August 2026

New The first version: a world map, a country's trending music videos, and — once you pick one — every other country charting it lit up by its position there.
New The page loads no third-party code and sets no tracking cookies. Charts are fetched ahead of time, so the YouTube key never reaches your browser and nothing you click is sent anywhere.