Do you know what deep orgcore sounds like? How about doomcore, deep Christmas, atmospheric post metal, vegan straight edge, Polynesian pop or Swedish reggae?
All of these musical genres are thriving on the Internet, where online streaming services allow devotees to listen to their favorite music and, if they so choose, nothing else. Spotify, the music streaming service, put together a series of charts and interactives showing the amazing variety of musical genres online and how these genres vary around the world.
Glenn McDonald, a “data alchemist” at Spotify, created an amazing interactive chart of the more than 1,300 different genres of music. The interactive version lets you click on each of the genres to hear a sample of the sound, while the “scan" option flips you through the channels in all their crazy variety.
Spotify also analyzed how loyal its users are to particular genres, by dividing the number of “streams” (the number of times the songs has been listened to) by the number of listeners.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, metal fans rank as the most hardcore about their genre. Around the world, Spotify found that metal had the most loyal listeners, followed by pop and folk. Classical and blues listeners tended to be the least "loyal" by this measure.
Looking at various countries around the world, the Spotify data shows that homegrown genres were more likely to attract loyal listeners. Australia had a penchant for Australian country, Brazil for Brazilian punk and rock gaucho, France for French reggae, and so on.
So which genre had the most "loyal" listeners in the U.S.? Regional Mexican scored highest, followed by Latin pop, Native American, emo, metal, punk and OPM (original Pilipino music, from the Philippines), clearly reflecting America's melting pot of immigrant communities.
Even though the Internetoffers music fansa huge amount of variety, it seems thattheyare most likely to listen to the music that reminds them of home.
