The project is rooted in the company’s attachment to traditional conceptions of music, fearful of the so-called “tyranny of the majority.”įor the simple fact that Tyler the Creator’s album IGOR won best Rap Album at the 62nd GRAMMY Awards despite not being a rap album, miscategorizations in the music industry aren’t new-even when specialists are in charge.
Wary of letting the Internet categorize music, Pandora’s algorithm relies on a framework designed by a team of musicologists. One of Spotify’s rival streaming services, Pandora, contests this experimental approach to music curation by insisting on categorizing music through a taxonomy information system called the “Music Genome Project.” The program focuses specifically on five genres of music: Pop/Rock, Hip-Hop/Electronica, Jazz, World Music, and Classical. While a Kaytranada song may fall into the traditional buckets of electronic, hip hop, R&B, dance, funk, and house, an approach to categorization by mood-like Spotify’s Audio Auras-may consider it “energetic” or “chill.” It also significantly reduces categorical overlaps.
Spotify music moods meaning software#
Tearing down the constraints of traditional genre, The Echo Nest’s software breathes fluidity into the public’s approach to organizing, finding, and consuming music. Music is thus categorized by the people, or rather, those actively contributing to online Internet discussions about music. All this information-culled from sweeping the youth-dominated web-helps build a “musical brain” accessible through APIs (application programming interfaces). For example, if “terms like ‘dreamy’ or ‘ethereal’ are frequently used to describe a Beach House album,” The Echo Nest assumes a connection between these terms and the band’s sound. These computer-measurable characteristics are organized into groups based on what the software calls “cultural data.” Through surveying the Internet using natural language processing techniques, the program defines the characteristics of each genre and subsequently labels each song. By parsing “an entire song in a few seconds and the signal into thousands of unique segments, including timbre, beat, frequency, amplitude, vocal syllables, notes,” The Echo Nest’s software distills each song into a set of data points used for categorization. So how do these platforms categorize and define vibes of music? A 2015 research paper titled “ Curation By Code: Infomediaries and the Data Mining of Taste ” explores this phenomenon by investigating The Echo Nest, a Spotify-owned music intelligence/data platform. Spotify includes “Mood” as a category on its genre page. Streaming services actively encourage a culture of music consumption that is highly personalized (though Spotify did comply with Adele’s recent request to remove a default shuffle button for albums). Not only are types of music evolving, the way that people listen to music is changing, as evidenced by the rise of self curation. In this vein, musicians-eager to find a unique sound-are growing increasingly defiant of genre.
Spotify music moods meaning series#
When a series of historical definitions are used to determine what is or isn’t music, new sounds are inevitably boxed in by existing conceptions of what music “should” be. Projects like this gesture towards a bigger question asked increasingly by my generation: is genre still relevant when it comes to describing taste? In a time where Kaytranada is considered an “electronic-hip-hop-R&B-dance-funk-house artist” and categories like “Country Pop” are frequented on Spotify, I doubt the labels “hip-hop” or “country” mean much to the average listener anymore.
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