Skip to content
Premieres

Facebook Can’t Get Enough of ‘Thrift Shop,’ Says Giant Amorphous Blob

Macklemore Ryan Lewis Thrift Shop Facebook Popular

The folks at Facebook have created a visualization that proves just how much their U.S. users love songs we despise. Above, you’ll find innovatively sourced, creatively rendered proof of the inescapable fact that America likes Macklemore and Ryan Lewis more than pretty much anything else. If kittens and cigarettes emitted quantifiable BPMs, which inform that amorphous blob, we’re fairly confident they’d rank below “Thrift Shop.”

Using the social platform’s Open Graph protocol, Facebook and San Francisco’s Stamen design firm created the “Beatquake” chart, which displays the top three songs being played through various FB-integrated apps at any given moment. The information varies by geographic location, the height of the color-coded song layer is determined by each song’s popularity, and the texture is modified by those songs’ respective beats per minute.

The two-minute visual follows 90 days of data, in which “Thrift Shop” is usurped very rarely and for relatively brief periods only. The Facebook Stories site highlights a few other key moments — such as when Britney Spears and will.i.am’s “Scream & Shout” explodes in New York on February 9 — but mostly, it’s a painful but cool-looking reminder that Macklemore is unabashedly loved by the masses.