Streaming services like Apple Music and Spotify have irrefutably changed the face of the music industry. Physical album sales are down and streams can earn millions. But how has streaming changed the many faces of music genres?
Spotify has gone to great lengths to automate genre classification. Spotify data alchemist Glenn McDonald, speaking to the online publication Distractify last year, described how their algorithm digests music and collects certain “subjective psychoacoustic attributes” of a song, like acousticness, color, volume and modernity before assigning the track to a genre.
McDonald is also the mastermind behind Every Noise at Once, a website that visually displays all of Spotify’s genres over a “map” based on their attributes. The site cataloged around 500 genres in 2013 according to the release notes, and now plots 6,132 in 2023. The site doesn’t prevent overlap between genres or insist on any rigid taxonomy. McDonald and his team have created several spin-off projects based on this data, including a look at the history of popular genres.
McDonald wrote in the methodology that the dataset is calculated by taking the currently most popular songs on Spotify from each year back to 1960, then having the algorithm assign genres and rank them based on their share of streams in that year.
“This process is neither wholly accurate nor wholly precise, but neither is music, yet they both often seem to work,” he wrote.
The first chart plots the yearly top 20 sub-genres since 1960 and colors them according to their parent genre. Rock claims the most separate sub-genres at 49 and has been the most historically dominant. However rock’s prominence has dwindled in the last decade and now alt-z, an emerging pop rock subset that includes acts like Melanie Martinez, Royal & The Serpent and Maggie Lindemann, is debatably the only remaining rock sub-genre that made the top 20 in 2023. This chart also highlights the emergence and persistence of hip-hop as well as the recent boom in latin music during the last five years.
The data also shows how diverse each year has been by marking how many parent genres appear. The most diverse years all occurred before 1980, and 1987 was the least diverse year with only pop and rock sharing the charts at six and 14 sub-genres, respectively.
Yet Every Noise at Once only tracks listeners on Spotify, and those listeners may be predisposed to certain sounds. For example, the music sales data provider Luminate detailed in their 2022 year-end report that country fans are more likely to listen to CDs and the radio over fans of other genres. On the other hand, Luminate also reported that worldwide overall streaming consumption grew by just under 26% from 2021 to 2022.
“Streaming has completely changed the game. But it has only changed the game for people who use streaming music and for people who are willing to crossover with genre,” said Kaleb Goldschmitt, an associate professor of music at Wellesley College.
Goldschmitt pinpointed the origin of “crossover:” the phenomenon where a listener is willing to hear a mix of genres. When the iPod Shuffle was released in 2005, users could literally not see the display. This in turn led to platforms developing playlist creation and editorial curation.
Jeremy D. Larson, the reviews director at the online music publication Pitchfork, described music genres as an “infinite fractal.”
“It feels like you’re looking at a multiverse, and that’s what streaming has done. And it’s up to the user and to the platform to be able to organize all of that,” he said.
Larson also said streaming has muddled what’s popular since so many different veins of music, past and present, are relevant at once. It can be difficult to track and predict trends.
“I think music now has a legibility problem because there’s so much of it and it’s so saturated. Part of creating a genre is to just try and separate it from the pack. It’s a crowded lane,” he said.
Goldschmitt explained that genre is a combination of two elements: an artist’s vision and industrial demands. There’s an infrastructure that upholds the boundaries of genre, including radio stations, concert promoters, magazines, television stations, blogs, etc. Those within country music in particular have been adamant in enforcing the genre’s boundaries, they said. Sometimes what separates genres is simple marketing.
“In terms of musical qualities like chord structures, melody, tempo, that kind of stuff—that is less important to genre than any musicologist wants to admit these days. It’s more about audience,” they said.
Goldschmitt, citing scholars like Robin James, an editor at Palgrave Macmillan, said that genre is transforming into something else: vibes.
“There’s a general vibe you’re looking for. You want music that’s good for the mood of a party, you want music that’s good for studying. So you’ll get these playlists that are sort of vaguely classified around genre, but what’s more important is the mood,” they said.
Five of the top 20 most popular Spotify playlists are genreless and two cracked the top ten, according to the music industry publication Hypebot. As of April 7, “Songs To Sing In The Car” was eighth on this list with 10.3 million likes, and “Beast Mode” at tenth with 9.9 million likes. Both playlists are made for certain vibes, whether it be rolling down the windows or hefting barbells.
The Washington Post quoted musician, scholar and author Elijah Wald on this change while reporting on how instrumental mood playlists are taking over Spotify:
“The logic [of radio consumption] has always been: Don’t play anything that will make someone change the channel. And that’s what you’re talking about when you talk about playlists. The point is, as long as it doesn’t break the mood, it’s all fine,” he said.
In 2016, Spotify began the annual marketing campaign “Spotify Wrapped” that presented users with interesting data points based on their personal listening habits from that year. Last year’s Wrapped event included mood profiles for listeners’ “audio day.” A user could have a “laid back poetic chill” morning, “joyous hype lit” afternoon and a “chill moody warm” night.
Prior to records, sheet music would tell the musician the style of play, Goldschmitt said. Ragtime, waltzes and other genres may have had different color covers, denoting different classifications. However, instrumentation was what defined music, since musicians needed to find sheet music for their instrument to play at home.
“It’s not like we haven’t had this kind of moment before. Now, the ‘instrument,’ or the medium, is what’s taking over and it’s being classified more as vibes and moods,” Goldschmitt said.
Larson said he feels somewhat “queasy” at the effects of streaming on the landscape of music, but sees genre as a way to navigate the “chaotic blob.”
“Some music just sucks. You gotta trust your gut — some genres are just terrible,” he said. “It’s all hard to know, that’s why I like to use the multiverse analogy. It becomes overwhelming to think about. Whatever you can do individually to make it make sense to you, I think that’s the ultimate goal.”