How Does Spotify Define Different House Music Genres?

In 2016, Spotify announced that they had music spanning 1,482 genres. Today, it’s well over 6,000. A lot of this comes down to the sheer amount of music that is being created. Music is changing rapidly, and in the house genre alone, there are hundreds of different subtypes. Even though humans may be capable of discerning one genre from another, it’s interesting to see how Spotify has evolved to do the same.  After all, new genres often emerge when there’s a shift in composition or style, and in some instances, artists themselves create new genres to define their music. Spotify has to work hard to keep up with all of this, and when songs span across different genres, it can be a challenge.

Segmenting House Music Genres

Spotify, like online casinos and streaming services, uses data to segment and categorize its offerings. The Paddy Power online casino has categories that include all-time favorites, new games, trending games, and popular games. Even though the slot games offered may be the same across different categories, they help to provide some degree of segmentation for gamers. The site also takes things one step further, by refining the subgenre of slots by splitting them off into jackpots, super wheel slots, and exclusives.

Netflix does this as well. You may notice various titles under their “new” banner, with the same ones popping up under the trending category or even under the Netflix Originals tab. They even have Netflix category codes, that refine their offerings even further.

Spotify have adopted this approach too, by bundling acid house music with deep house, microhouse, electro house, and big room house on playlists. With that being said, if you wanted to search for a specific subgenre, you’d see entire playlists dedicated to just that.

User playlists also help to give the streaming service insight into what songs work together, with this data being used to further refine genres. Spotify uses different data forms to help determine what genre a song should fall into, including user playlists, beats-per-minute, and associated artists.

Source: Pexels

Creating Smaller Subgenres for House Music

By harnessing data, it becomes easier to go down a rabbit hole, finding smaller and smaller subgenres with more niche types of music. Music fans have a big part to play here too, as playlist popularity often gives Spotify a good indication of whether or not that subgenre is worth exploring. Spotify’s public playlists are a prime example here, of how the platform targets particular niches by bundling popular songs of a particular genre together.

Spotify’s approach, which involves using data to categorize songs and genres, has been very successful so far. The more people who use the platform, and the more artists who upload their songs, the more accurate the platform algorithm becomes. It’s a self-learning machine, and the fact that it’s so intelligent is giving house music artists a gateway in which to break through the market. Artists can capitalize on new genre trends by adding metadata that correlates to new movements, or trends.

This is helping the house music movement as a whole while giving fans the experience they’re looking for.