Data Analysis Every Song Ever

At this moment in 2017, there are currently 1,538 different music genres. This is according to “an algorithmically-generated, readability-adjusted scatter-plot of the musical genre-space” called Every Noise at Once (McDonald, 2013). An engineer of The Echo Nest, the intelligence platform that is behind Spotify’s recommendation algorithms, created the interactive visualization of today’s “genre-space”. Spotify's use of algorithms is a far cry from flipping through physical albums, under a paper tag, labeled ‘rock’. The increasingly complex, cross-contaminating, music culture creating these sub-genres, is the reason that The Echo Nest’s data analysis is used for almost all music platforms today. Practically all music ever recorded is available

In his book Every Song Ever, Ratliff attempts to steer the reader away from developing a restraining affinity for a specific style by saying that “genre is a construct for the purpose of commerce, not pleasure, and ultimately for the purpose of listening to less” (2016). Ratliff tries to encourage productive and open listening in an overwhelming world, by defining ‘genre’ as simply a stylistic organizational technique. This is an incomplete and outdated definition of genre. By modern listeners questioning the music community’s pre-digital language, they are rediscovering genre as the binding of culture, industry, and environment, and its boundless re-contextualization of musical

Early music communities learned that the relationship between physical space and the rules of music consumption, defined the boundaries of musical style. Musical space moved from the church, to the concert hall, to clubs, to the dance floor, to physical CDs, to online data. The rituals surrounding these spaces of listening, help audience’s understand their role as listeners. A concert hall asks the listener to hold a concentrated, and physically quiet relationship with the music. A dance club asks the audience to experience the music with their bodies. The rules of listening are defined by the composer, not only in the chosen style but in the chosen performance space. Just as musical style is defined by what it is not, genre is defined by the spaces in which it does not belong. Genre defines the rules for how listeners interact with music. Audiences were instructed to listen to the style of the composer, in the music spaces allowed by the music industry. In the digital world, all sounds can exist in all spaces. Songs can have many composers, from many styles, sometimes even with contradicting rules of interaction, which is the case for electronic sampling, hip hop mixtapes, minimalism, and multimedia music. When the listener is in control of a song’s performance space, and song’s style is buried beneath layers of sub-genres, the rules surrounding the listeners engagement with that