Spotify allows users to see their music summary of the year since last Wednesday, December 2.
This function, which has already become a tradition at this time, offers the platform's listeners figures and data about the music they have heard in 2020: the songs and groups that have sounded the most from their account, the total minutes of music and the number of musical genres listened to.
This last piece of information has caught the attention of many users, who have discovered that their musical tastes, according to Spotify, are broader than they thought: they have listened to hundreds of musical genres.
Among this huge number of genres appear some as striking as
antiviral pop, orgcore, swedish idol pop
... And even rock or rap appear fragmented as
soft rock, art rock, sad rap
, etc.
Many genres are also distinguished by their place of origin:
Italian rock, Chicago rap, German Pop, Canadian Hip Hop
… Maybe you have asked yourself the same thing as many users on social networks: but are there really so many musical genres?
How are they cataloged and why?
Spotify saying that I have listened to 602 musical genres // I thought there were only 15 pic.twitter.com/w50SZ8uePd
- Obito (@ 6ustinho) December 2, 2020
* I believe that there are only 5 genres *
Spotify: pic.twitter.com/HT46UDvxOv
- 주디스 셀라 야 (@zahiracelaya) December 2, 2020
Julio Arce, director of the Department of Musicology at the Complutense University of Madrid, explains to
Verne
that defining musical genre is "something very controversial in musicology", because it depends on different factors that, in addition, change over time.
“For example, the Italian musicologist Franco Fabri believes that genres cannot be explained solely by sound characteristics.
They are the result of social agreements and conventions ”, he says.
"There are other elements that explain the makeup of a genre, for example, the meanings of music, the behavior of musicians and audiences, the way it is produced, disseminated or commercialized ...".
Arce gives heavy metal as an example: "It is not only a musical genre because of the way the guitars are played, the lyrics of the songs or the way the vocalists sing," he explains, "but because of how the groups present themselves in the stage, how they interact with audiences, what is said about music in magazines, how it is marketed, etc ”.
So, has Spotify analyzed the attitude of, for example,
Australian post hardcore bands
on stage for categorization?
No: according to the company's blog in a post entitled “How Spotify discovers the genres of tomorrow”, the categorizations are made thanks to the “alchemy of data”: user listening patterns, the function of songs (“ ballet music for children "or" music to relax ", for example), related searches after listening to a certain artist, playlist or genre ... And even an artificial intelligence that evaluates songs by their" subjective psychoacoustic attributes ": if they are danceable, energetic, happy, sad, relaxing ...
The person in charge of carrying out this "data alchemy", organizing the categories for Spotify and "baptizing" the new genres is Glenn McDonald, also author of
Every Noise at Once
: a page that, using information from Spotify, creates a gigantic map with all the musical genres of the platform.
By clicking on them, an example song can be heard.
Currently, there are more than 5,000 genres, organized on the map according to their sounds: above, the most electronic;
below, the most organic;
on the left, the darkest and densest, and on the right, the liveliest and noisiest.
A tiny bit of Glenn McDonald's music genre map.
Click on the image to go to the full interactive map
And what is the use of separating music into genres?
The number of genres on Spotify has not stopped growing in recent years.
Currently, according to
Every Noise at Once, there
are more than 5,000.
In 2018, as can be read on the Spotify blog, there were about 2,000 and in 2019, according to
Mondo Sonoro
magazine
in an interview with Glenn McDonald, 3,000.
Julio Arce believes that, more than genres, these Spotify categories could be cataloged as descriptive tags to help order and consume music.
"The listener's experience is easier if the music is presented organized," says the musicologist.
"The listener goes directly to that music or to that area of styles, types, genres or whatever we want to call it, that he feels closest to".
Classifying music, explains Arce, has various uses beyond making it easier for us to listen to it.
"Human beings tend to organize their environment to make their existence easier," says the musicologist.
"Categorizing music helps us, for example, to distinguish ourselves socially and recognize ourselves by our tastes."
However, this cataloging also has a function for companies like Spotify: to increase consumption.
“If we entered a music server and the songs were arranged in alphabetical order, it would be very difficult for us to find things,” explains Arce.
"Capitalism imposes gender because it structures the market and facilitates purchase."
In that regard, Spotify not only facilitates consumption with its thousands of genres, but also recommends.
"In addition to a platform that offers music, Spotify acts as a prescriber and contributes, therefore, to its classification", considers Arce.
"The evolution of Spotify itself has gone from simply displaying music for consumption to organizing its catalog to tell the listener what to hear."
It does this by recommending playlists and news, through its radio or related artists.
Thanks to these recommendations, we also discover new music and thus, in 2021, we will be able to rediscover hundreds of more genres.
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