Looking for a way to misuse a few hours of your day, check out Poly-Graph.co/hiphop/, which uses Billboard's weekly sales-based Hot Rap Songs chart as the basis for tracking the history of hip hop hits from 1995 through 2015.
A little background: Billboard began publishing the list as a weekly sales-based chart in 1989. Back then, it was known as the Hot Rap Singles chart. In 2002, it was replaced with Hot Rap Tracks, based on radio audience impressions monitored by Nielsen Music. The chart added digital downloads and streaming data into its formula in 2012, when it was given its current Hot Rap Songs title.
For simplicity's sake, the animated line chart only displays songs that peaked in the top 5. It is a pretty fun listen and watch, nonetheless, and you can get direct info about each artist that gets play with a little hover action.
Poly-Graph has plenty of other music-related graphs to get lost in, too — The Largest Vocabulary in Hip Hop ranks rappers by the number of unique words used in their lyrics; The Most Timeless Songs of All Time uses Spotify to measure the popularity of music; and What is Punk? crowdsources the Definition of 'punk' using playlist data.
Enjoy!