Creating Spotify genre searches

Spotify have been bit by bit increasing the ways you can modify your search to find music categorized in various ways. You can filter the search by year, label, genre and artist etc.

One of the ways to make use of this is to make Spotify behave more like a radio station without having to conform to the ridiculously broad genres listed on the “Radio”-tab.

For instance, you could type in “year:1971-1978 genre:folk” in the search box and be greated with a healthy dose of Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Nick Drake and Elton John (that last one is a bit WTF!).

Now, there are a few problems with this. The first one is that the tagging of artists with genre data seems to be a bit wonky. In some genres, there seems to be quite the heavy overrepresentation of some artists. Secondly, the year parameter won’t know about original release dates: the many reissues of Elvis Costellos “My Aim Is True” will be tagged with the year the reissue was released, not the original year. Some albums are only available in these reissues, and therefore not included in a search for the original release. Lastly, since Spotify doesn’t have any form of browsing by genre (or any other criteria for that matter, which plain sucks), there’s no way of knowing which these genres are, apart from the handful listed on the “Radio”-tab.

Interwebz to the rescue! After searching a bit, I found a comment on the Spotify blog where someone linked to a Google Docs File containing an, allegedly, complete list of genres. I’ve only tried a handful of the more exotic ones, but it seems to work — but you need to convert the genre names to lowercase and remove the whitespace in the ones with more than one word in them. “Alternative Country” becomes “alternativecountry”, you get the idea…

Now go forth and explore!

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