ESCAPE THE GENRE

The year is coming to an end. If not the dates in the calendar then there’s always something that reminds you that. Yesterday I Filled out Spotify's "2017 wrapped". It’s a fun visualization of your data on Spotify. You can find out how many minutes did you listened to Spotify, what are your top 5 artists this year, what was your top genre and more.

I found out that my top genre is escape room. Felt really confused, because it was the first time that I’ve heard the term being used anywhere else except when talking about games.

After googling I found this article that relieves what’s underneath the genre. As Glenn McDonald, Spotify's "data alchemist", explains: “This is one where the genre comes from collective listening patterns, but I made up the name myself, because I couldn’t figure out any existing one to apply. The vibe is kind of an underground-trap/PC-music/indietronic/activist-hip-hop kind of thing, and I thought of “escape room” both for the sense of escaping from trap, and for the ideas of excitement, puzzle-solving and indoorness implied by the actual physical escape-room phenomenon.”

Glenn McDonald is also the author of a site called everynoise.com. “This is an ongoing attempt at an algorithmically-generated, readability-adjusted scatter-plot of the musical genre-space, based on data tracked and analyzed for 1538 genres by Spotify.” In short, you can explore genres, artists and discover more.

Plus, you can easily preview artists just by clicking on the name & a symbol will pop up, so you know what have you already listened to.

Another plus, the map gets updated.

I feel that I could get lost for a long time in that map just to discover more & more.

Anyways, interesting stuff.

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This is an interesting lecture by Robert Henke where he talks about a problem in music production that there’s no limits and how it affects the workflow. I can see how that can be applied to other art fields as well. He also speaks about genres today, that it doesn’t matter anymore how the music was made so much. Before people tended to use this term “computer music” as a genre. Those days are gone. I believe that, because of the unlimited options, it is so hard to draw strict boundaries when it comes to choosing the genre. As a result, I think, we will see even more different methods when it comes to defining a genre, not only the “escape room” way.