Listening to one Song from every Genre on Spotify

So, there's this playlist: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/69fEt9DN5r4JQATi52sRtq?si=128c13407af5405e. It contains one song from each genre Spotify has in its database, sorted alphabetically by genre (from 21st Century Classical to Zydeco). There's almost 6000 of them. I've set out to listen to the entirety of it.

Has anyone done this before and wants to nerd out about it? Or is anyone up for coming along on the ride? As I'm writing this, I'm listening to "CZSK Hip Hop", but I'm listening at a leisurely pace and I'm sure you could still catch up if that kind of thing is important to you.

Also, ask me anything about this little project.

I added the top 5 singles for every genre on RYM to my listening list for Centuries of Sound, which is a bit like that, unfortunately it will most likely be a decade or more until I get to most of them.

Will keep an eye on the thread for any gems you find.

~600 albums worth of seemingly arbitrary songs in made up genres like "Album Rock" and "Banjo" doesn't sound like a great use of time but hey, maybe your effort will yield some gems for the rest of us

I've been adding songs I like to this playlist: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7dikLbsMynq41b0vUgRkHT?si=a56f15afdda945e5, and ones I particularly dislike to this one: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/56prpx60uFgTZIfna3o9r0?si=0953c89a3b784dd8.

So far, some general observations are that I like metal and country more than I thought, and that there's a ton of genres of dance music from various African countries that really slap. Also, a lot of forms of Christian Worship Music make my toes curl. Oh, and there seems to be an version of milquetoast restaurant background music in every culture in the world.

Also, Indexed, your skepticism is well noted and to some extent warranted, I guess. The genres are made up, but then again, isn't everything? For me, the only real downside of that is that I try to learn something about every genre, and some of the genre names ("Alt-Z") are only used by Spotify and they're not really explained anywhere.

The appeal for me is that this is arguably as close as one can come to listening to "one of everything". It's kinda like when a bored child ends up reading an encyclopedia front to back.

"The Sound Of Everything"

The title of that playlist seems to be correct. Can't get more eclectic, doesn't it.

listening to it and at least for now no skipped songs, thank you.

Haha, you're welcome. Looking forward to finding out how far y'all are gonna make it.

You're of course free to do whatever you want, but my personal rule is that I'm not allowed to skip songs, even if that means listening to nine minutes of a children's book in a language I don't understand.

At my current pace, I should be finished sometime in early 2024.

but by that time the mighty glenn mcdonald will have created at least 3000 additional genres, so you will be probably stuck in this loop forever

but thanx for alerting me to that playlist, should be fun to skim and/or delve into

I'm always interested to find out what's going to come at the end of sentences that begin "made up genres like...". We really only make up names for communities without their own names for themselves yet. And we definitely did not make up the names "album rock" or "banjo".

You can see the genres in the order we (it's not just me) add them here (latest first):

https://everynoise.com/everynoise1d.cgi?vector=added&scope=all

After adding 1200+ in each of 2019 and 2020, we only added 600 in 2021 and ~300 in 2022, so it's a big project but maybe it's no longer getting bigger at an unmanageable rate.

You're of course free to do whatever you want, but my personal rule is that I'm not allowed to skip songs, even if that means listening to nine minutes of a children's book in a language I don't understand.
― Bastienne

It may be tempting to call this approach 'calvinist work ethic', but it can be also very satisfying to earn new music by patient listening. There's always this lingering hope to find that one special favorite song hidden in the vaults. Of course you will never find it, that's part of the game.

I think it‘s a little of both. I liken this little project to what reading the complete works of Shakespeare is for an English major. And they wouldn‘t skip pages, would they? At least they wouldn‘t tell anyone they did LOL.

But on the other hand, listening to entire tunes led to me getting acquainted to a genre‘s sonic texture, which made it easier to discern and appreciate it. For example, I was pretty ignorant about metal in all its forms and pretty much thought it consisted of Manowar, Metallica and Cannibal Corpse, and I wasn‘t too interested in either of these. But now I‘ve learned that the genre‘s subgenres are very different from each other (say, power metal to black speed metal) and some of them I enjoy quite a lot. And I‘m pretty sure this would never have happened had I just been able to skip at will.

Also, Glenn McDonald: thanks for the reassurance! I had actually wondered about that myself.

One of the more annoying aspects of this is that when I start a listening session, I have to find the song I finished off with the last time and that's not trivial among 6000 songs. Right now, I use the "favorite" feature as a bookmark, but even with that, it sometimes takes me minutes to find the song in the list. Does anyone have a better idea?

I assume you've already made your own copy of the playlist, right? If not, you should definitely do that, because my version changes weekly, at least, and sometimes more often than that.

And then once you've made one personal reference copy, maybe make a second copy to use for listening, and delete songs from the top of it after you're done with them, so it acts as a queue of what's left?

Thanks for the advice, Glenn McDonald! That worked well.

In case anyone wondered: I'm at around 25% now - 4569 to go.

Currently, I'm listening to all the "Deep" genres (from "Deep Acoustic Pop" to "Deep Vocal Jazz") and I'm kind of puzzled by the question what makes them "deep". And I'm extra amused about a genre called "Deep Deep Tech House".

In most of those cases the idea of "deep x" is something like "the x bands that only people deeply into the x scene know".

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f9/Deepdeeptrouble.jpg

Yay, down to 4000! Only 268 more hours to go...