For years
everynoiseatonce has been kicking around, quietly compiling Spotify audio data and presenting it in the form of an interactive, customizable music discovery engine. For those who might not have explored it before, the site was built by one dude from Echo Nest, who describes the project as a categorical perception spectrum of genres and subgenres based on “an algorithmically-generated, readability-adjusted scatter-plot of the musical genre-space, based on data tracked and analyzed for 1461 genres by Spotify.”
Click on any genre in the map to hear a song of that style. Ever explore Russiavision? Nintendocore? Norwegian Gospel? How about Christian Hardcore? It’s all here.
But the initial layer of the site is just the beginning. Click the arrow beside a genre label to recluster the data into a cloud of related artists of the chosen genre. The ‘scan’, ‘playlist’, ‘pulse’, and ‘edge’ buttons will pull related content from Spotify.
Or click the ‘list’ menu item on the homepage for a vertical hierarchy of genres, dynamically sortable by factors including popularity, emergence, modernity, engagement, and “
xmasness” among others. And clicking any resulting genre will resort the results by similarity to the selected style.
It’s a metadata K-hole for sure, but you might just find something you like.
As someone who’s never touched Spotify or any other streaming service, it’s curious to crawl their data this way. I’d love to hear if anyone has found the site useful?
