Genres per Year
Musical genre assigned to each song in the Chart Songs archive, shown by year. Each song is given a single best-fit genre, not multiple labels. Toggle genres below to show or hide categories.
Linguistic Insights
Rap becomes the sound of the charts
In the 2020s a large majority of chart songs carry a Rap label, up from a negligible share before 1990. This is not gradual drift but a structural shift: Deutschrap moved from subculture to the defining sound of German chart music within two decades — a transformation without parallel across the corpus's seventy-year span. Its imprint on overall corpus volume is visible under Songs per Year →.
Schlager peaked in the 1970s
Schlager reaches its highest share in the 1970s, at around 40% of charted songs, then tapers through the 1980s and 1990s as popular music internationalised. One caveat: many Schlager-style songs of the 1950s and 1960s are labelled simply Pop — which accounts for over 85% of early chart entries — so the true reach of Schlager-influenced music before 1970 is likely higher than the genre label alone suggests.
Primary genre per song · Chart Songs (HIT archive) only · genre assigned by priority rule from Genius tags
These analyses are based on corpus data as of July 29, 2026.