Time-travel through 62 years of pop-radio history

Popular music has always served as a good snapshot of the era from which it came, and thanks to the Internet, it’s gotten easier and easier to riffle through those snapshots at top speed. Building on an idea previously seen in those medleys of every No. 1 single from Billboard’s Hot 100, the Radio Time Machine takes pop-music time-tourism one step further, offering up 62 years’ worth of hit radio singles via a nifty slidebar-based widget that lets you scan through the most popular music of 1940 onward. It’s seriously cool, and well-designed to boot (though it doesn’t seem to like Firefox browsers very much), and if you have a Rdio account, you can sign in to hear full song instead of 30-second clips. Spend a couple of hours tripping through time and marvel at how Elvis completely changed the radio landscape, or discover what songs people were getting totally sick of the year you were born. (Mine: “Billie Jean,” “Sweet Dreams,” “All Night Long”… not bad, not bad at all.)