Close All Tabs - The Spotify Effect, Pt 2: Micro-Genre Madness

Episode Date: June 18, 2025

Spotify didn’t just change how we listen to music — it changed what a genre even is. In this episode, producer and rapper Quinn reflects on being thrust into the spotlight at age 15 as one of the breakout faces of Spotify’s meteoric Hyperpop playlist.. Then, music journalist Kieran Press-Reynolds breaks down how Spotify’s made-up micro-genres—like Goblincore, Anime Drill, and Bubblegrunge—are reshaping music discovery and putting pressure on artists to conform. Guests: Quinn, independent producer and rapper Kieran Press-Reynolds, independent reporter covering music and internet culture Further reading: How to break free of Spotify's algorithm — Tiffany Ng, MIT Technology Review The Lost Promises of Hyperpoptimism — Kieran Press-Reynolds, Pitchfork Read the transcript here Want to give us feedback on the series? Shoot us an email at [e-mail] You can also follow us on Instagram Credits: This episode was reported and hosted by Morgan Sung. Our Producer is Maya Cueva. Chris Egusa is our Senior Editor. Additional editing by Jen Chien. Sound design by Chris Egusa and Brendan Willard. Theme and credits music by Chris Egusa, with additional music from APM. Mixing and mastering by Brendan Willard. Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad and Alana Walker. Katie Sprenger is our Podcast Operations Manager. Holly Kernan is our Chief Content Officer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support for a Key QBD podcast comes from Xfinity. Thanks to the Xfinity five-year price guarantee, your guaranteed five years of reliable Wi-Fi with our best equipment, no annual contracts, and no fees. Plus, get online in minutes with same-day Wi-Fi. Lock in your price and unlock the possibilities. Xfinity, imagine that. Restrictions apply, select plans only.

Ugh, you also having trouble with scammers trying to poke holes in your dam? We need a phone plan that stops these pensions. at the perimeter. That's why I switched to Google File Wireless, a wireless plan built with industry-leading security. Google AI helps block pesky scammers so my info stays secure, and best of all, unlimited plans start at just $35 a month. Whatever you do, your sake with Google. Explore Google File Wireless Plans today. Plus taxes and government fees. Block spam known to Google may not detect all spam calls. My name is Quinn. I'm a recording artist as well as a producer. I'm a recording artist, as well as a producer.

Shit. Yeah. Quinn is just 20, but she's been making music since she was little. I started producing at 9 on my mother's iPad, and then when I was like 12, I started sharing music on fucking band lap. The world seemed to come to a standstill when the pandemic hit in 2020. But that's when Quinn really threw herself into music. She would stay up all night talking to other producers. on Discord. But that shit was so fun that it, like, fried my dopamine receptors.

Just had nothing but time on our hands. It was making music going crazy on the music. We used to do stuff like beat battles where we all get a sample. And we try to flip it in 30 minutes and whoever, you know, book-de-wook wins. No real reward in it. Just see whoever, like, has the most talent or whatever. At 15 years old, Quinn had amassed a sizable underground fan base.

Then in late 2020, her music, blew up. I woke up in my Twitter notifications that somebody just reposted like a screenshot of the Spotify playlist and I had a picture of me. I ain't going to lie, when I initially saw it, I was just like, oh, that's cool. Her photo and music had been featured on Spotify's official hyperpop playlist, a platform

that wound up launching careers and shaping an entire genre. Like, I was kind of just the face of it for a while, along with other artists as well. But they just kept putting me back on the cover. And I was just like, shit. Like, now everybody wanted to be on the hyperpop playlist. Like, once they saw one person did it and it was possible, everybody knew it was possible, which I felt amazing about. Like, if you got called a hyperpop artist, like, people was getting living wages from having two,

three tracks on the playlist. So the term hyperpop suddenly became a big deal. But no one really knew what it meant. It seemed like any vaguely electronic music with angsty lyrics could be called hyperpop. The scene that I came from has existed long before me. And for a while, nobody knew what to put a title to it. Like, they didn't know what the fuck did call it. So they just called everything, like hyperpop.

They called it underground rap, hyperpop. They called drum and bass hyperpop. They called just any regular house club, anything that's fast-paced. they called it Hyperpop. And I didn't really see it to be a viable umbrella term because some of this shit is not hyper and it's definitely not pop. But I'd say Hyperpop was more of like a tool of branding than a genre title.

This is what Spotify has become notorious for, identifying emerging music scenes, calling them microgenres, and slapping on labels before the community making that kind of music has time to decide what to call itself. Artists themselves often don't know what the labels mean. Spotify was definitely king of buzzwords for a fucking minute. Like, just making bullshit.

Oh, my God. I can't even remember half of the names they came up with. Oh, yeah, they're calling certain songs like hood trap and shit. That one just feels racially motivated, bro. Bed rotting. Goblin core. Anime drill, lofi jazz hop, pink Pilates strut pop, mellow gold,

And my personal favorite, bubble grunge. And there are thousands more. But beyond the absurd names, Quinn says this practice is actually problematic for artists. You know, they affect artists bad because here's the thing, here's what happens. They drop a playlist and they're putting all these artists into that playlist. And it's like this new-ass genre name. Like no one's ever heard of this shit before. It's like, what the hell?

So sometimes that creates competition. Like, so you got a genre like, I don't know, fucking, they call it proto country or some shit. You're going to get a whole bunch of country artists who have, they don't even know what that's supposed to sound like, but they're getting put into this playlist. And it's like, bro, like, they've seen a lot of streams from it because it's a Spotify official playlist and everything. So things get competitive. And then that's where everybody be like, yo, you know what?

I'm the creator of this shit. Like, no, I created this shit. So now you just have an ongoing feud forever. And now it's always competitive. And you got this genre that didn't even get to flourish on its own. without an audience to have an opinion on it. So it's like, damn, bro. I think that's what happened with Hyperpop.

Quinn actually doesn't consider herself a hyperpop artist. She released some hyperpop music after blowing up. But since then, her sound has evolved drastically. She said that the popularity of the playlist pressures artists to continue creating the same music in order to continue getting playlisted. Most days, I see that shit, and I'm like, bro, I blew up way too early

because that shit has set a crazy standard. It's sitting at 20 million. and what? Like, I just, I don't know how I'm supposed to surpass 20 million streams. Well, I know how I'm supposed to. It just doesn't feel very realistic. So it set a crazy standard for me. Listeners might only learn about emerging music scenes from Spotify's microgenre playlist.

But where do these microgenres even come from? And are they accurate representations of these music communities? This is Close All Taves. I'm Morgan Sung, tech journalist, and you're chronically on. online friend, here to open as many browser tabs as it takes to help you understand how the digital world affects our real lives. Let's get into it. Time for a new tab. Every noise at once. Before we get deeper into microgenres, we need to talk about how Spotify came up with them in the first place. My friend Kieran is going to help explain it all. Hey, I'm Kieran Press Reynolds. I'm a writer at

Pitchfork and other places. I read about the internet and the intersection of technology and music and microgenres, TikTok trends, kind of all the digital detritus and genius happening online. It all started back in 2013 with this project called Every Noise at Once. So there's this guy, this like programmer and kind of genius in a way named Glenn McDonald, who had this sort of like genre discovering algernal. It would scrape the internet and different platforms and basically map out the entire musical world. He put it all online, and the website featured this massive, color-coded scatterplot, a word map of music from around the internet. Instead of dots, it had genre names that you could click on, and it would play an example.

And there were subgenres within each genre. The whole thing was arranged to show how each genre relates to other. on the map. So, in the words of Gly MacDonald, the bottom of the map is more organic. You have genres like Dutch Baroque. And toward the top is where it gets more mechanical and electric. That's where you'll find genres like acid core. In between all that is where it gets really interesting. The left of the map is, quote, denser and more atmospheric, whereas the right side is spikier and Bouncier. So, for example, all the way on the left of the map, you might see a genre like void gaze. But all the way on the right, directly across from void gaze, you'll see something

like Rwandan hip-hop. It would scan text, and so it would look at like journalist reports of like what people have called these artists before. And it would look at like sonic attributes, like I guess probably like the tempo or whether something had a certain instrument or like happy or sad-sounding music, bright, you know, dark. And it would combine all these things into like an equation. And combining that with like regional details and maybe even like sort of like similar artists that had been, that had liked that stuff or had been kind of associated with it, and it would group it together into an amalgam. Every noise at once was essentially a constantly evolving encyclopedia of music taxonomy.

Glenn McDonald created it while working at Echo Nest. music data firm that Spotify acquired in 2014. After that acquisition, Spotify incorporated Glenn's genre data mapping into its recommendation features and playlists. He maintained every noise at once on the side, but at Spotify was in charge of categorizing songs and naming new genres. So everything that Glenn would find through every noise at once would become like a Spotify playlist, and they would use that data to kind of like map out emerging scenes. Sometimes, the genre names were based on what people in the music industry actually called it. But a lot of times, these hyper-specific niche microgenres seem to come out of nowhere. Kieran describes finding

one randomly one day. I just see this playlist called Escape Room and it looks official and I click on it and there's like a weird image and it says like there's not really a bio but it's like see also other playlists and there's like pulse and like drift and like isolation. chamber or something. And then I Google Escape Room and there are other people online also confused, like on Reddit. And then I eventually find like an interview with the guy who runs every noise at once talking about it. And he's basically just like, yeah, I like made it up.

In a Spotify blog post, Glenn McDonald said Escape Room, quote, feels connected to trap sonically, although it's more experimental indie R&B pop that spins off from the Sonics of Trapp. So like five genres just mashed together into nothing. And yeah, he said it's a silly play on Trapped, but it reflects something about solving and creating puzzles and music. Dog was just playing around. As a personal project, every noise at once was incredibly cool. In the decade he spent running it, Glenn would update the site with features that tracked music across cities, generations, record labels, you name it. Sometimes the names were silly, but most of the time, the genres were based on real data science.

However, Kieran says that when Spotify used that data to optimize their playlist curation, they usually overlooked a lot of the cultural nuances that make up music scenes. Well, I think in the first place, it sort of devalues what music and culture is. Like, I mean, Spotify, I think itself is like, it's a tech platform, right? And it's always trying to chase profit and scale, which comes to the expense of, like, proper context. And I think every noise at once, what it's trying to do is basically say that unless you can capture it with data, then it might not be worthy of being called a genre. And like you see this happening with other things on the platform where, you know, they said unless something gets a thousand

streams, then they're not going to give any of the money to the artist because it's almost like not, it's not worthy of being called a song unless people are listening to it. But there are tons of like cultural scenes and little, you know, microcosms of society that aren't even online and their music, it can't be grasped by data because it's not racking up streams in that way. And what happens is that like you can have a genre almost like forced into being because it might not have enough streams unless you combine a bunch of artists that aren't necessarily together into like a made up macro term or a label and Spotify and every noise at once. once has done this where they've kind of forced different musicians together into an umbrella term

that they can sort of say is its own genre. And that's exactly how Quinn ended up as the face of hyperpop, even if she didn't consider herself to be a hyperpop artist. Spotify's hyperpop playlist was pretty controversial among musicians. We'll talk about that after a break. Support for KQED podcasts comes from Star One Credit Union. Give your savings account the love it deserves. When you keep your money with Star 1, you keep more of your money.

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Let's open a new tab. What happened to Hyperpop? It is so funny because Hyperpop is like the thing where like I'll email my dad and be like listen to the song and he'll be like, this is absolute rubbish. Like what are you listening to? And it's like it is like the stuff that will kill a Victorian child. Before Hyperpop, there was PC music. PC music in the early 20,

tens was like this British collective of like A.G. Cook, Sophie, Hannah Diamond, these various like experimental singers and producers whose whole thing was sort of like pushing pop to an almost like farcical, like ridiculous extent. And built into it were like critiques of capitalism and almost this like accelerationist desire to push capitalism so far that it's like, it's like a parody of itself. And so you'd have like robotic voices just like so glittery. It's like deliciously sugary music. And so it did really like stand for something and there was like a hyper energy to it. And they were really influential and inspired a lot of newer gen people. This newer generation of musicians took a lot of influence from PC music, but also from other

genres too. Some took more of an emo or punk approach. while others leaned into lofi beats and rap. Or they blended all of it together. Many of these artists making this kind of surreal, experimental music were trans and formed collectives online. As these online communities grew and amassed listeners, Spotify noticed. And by 2019, the platform had enough data to justify calling it a genre. They launched a sprawling playlist of artists who made some form of electronic music and gave it a name.

Yeah, I think Hyperpop is one of the, most fascinating examples of how Spotify has impacted and sort of rewired the culture. And it's something that I hear a lot in public, even among like my friends who are very tapped in, they'll be like, well, Hyperpop was invented by Spotify. And I'm like, no, like you're falling for the slander. It's really so Hyperpop, it's been going on for like a decade and a half at this point. Like people were using the term. but it got to a thing where

I think every noise at once could see the data that there were artists that were big enough to qualify to become a genre on Spotify and so in the early stages of it which was I believe like 2019 and 2020 it became this almost like community hub

because simultaneously while Spotify is sort of sucking up power in the music industry journalism is falling apart and there are less and less young people who are writing about these emerging scenes. And so in the absence of, like, somebody who's going to explain what Hyperpop is and provided the proper context, Spotify's playlist became the first thing that would show up when you Google it Hyperpop. And so for a lot of people who were discovering it during the pandemic, it became the, like, guiding light, like the tour guide for what this thing is.

This is why Quinn described Hyperpop more as branding than as a genre. Over time, the playlist started to define the genre instead of the other way around. A lot of the artists who were in it and some of whom were being put on the playlist were very young people. And so this was like their first kind of like chance at being known. And a lot of them, their livelihood became based on whether or not they were, they had a song included on it because the royalty boost they would get would like pay their rent. And then simultaneously, there were so many sort of like inter-scene feuds because Spotify would let various people take over the playlist for a month. And then one month, A.G. Cook, the godfather, PC music took it over and basically put in a ton of music that people thought was not Hyperpop at all and was less of this grassroots like DIY, queer, trans stuff that had kind of invented the genre.

and more just like random famous musicians. So those smaller DIY artists lost a lot of streaming revenue once they were removed from the playlist. And it eventually made it so that a bunch of different artists who made rap and who made pop and who made internety music were just all consolidated into this hazy blur of a label. And it got to the point where it's really sad, but people just didn't want to identify as hyperpop anymore

because of how stained and polluted the label was. Even though I think hyperpop is a good term and it predated the playlist. Now, for a lot of people, it's like hopelessly contaminated. Thanks to Spotify. For a lot of them, like artists like Quinn, who at one point told me, she felt like the trans, like POC origins was being like whitewashed out of hyperpop. I think those people felt this sort of like sickness toward hyperpop.

sort of seeing their impact be erased. You know, one of my big things is, like, I don't think playlists are necessarily evil, and I think you can put a lot of, like, heart and thought into them, but I think you look at other platforms like title where they have, like, an editorial arm where they can, like, provide context for choices and, like, Spotify is a massive company, and, you know, all you have to do is, like, get a writer or two to, like, research and explain what the history of hyperpop is and, like, what PC music did, their impact. And I think what has happened is because of how important the hyperpop playlist is

and because of how industry heads have sort of like used that as the one tool for like what's popping, it's created this feedback loop where newer people and industry plants are told to make music like this because it's the hyperpot playlist and we want to make a trendy sound. And so it has this watered down effect. Hyperpop is just one example of the way that Spotify's playlists have changed the sound and meaning of a genre. In this case, hyperpop existed well before Spotify named it. But what happens when the platform creates an entirely new genre? How does that impact the way listeners connect to artists?

Let's talk about that in a new tab. Spotify's microgenre problem. Okay, let's go through a few different microgenres that have popped up on Spotify in recent years. So a couple of years ago, Kieran stumbled across a Spotify playlist called WebCore. Oh gosh. I don't know that it doesn't sound like anything because it's not real. WebCore is a visual style that people usually use to describe digital life in the early 2000s. It's nostalgic for a simpler version of the internet.

Think of the Windows XP background with the rolling green hills and bright blue sky. Or picture early blog posts, pixelated clip art, basic HTML layouts, and gaudy Microsoft word art in clashing colors. When WebCore gained popularity as a design choice, Spotify launched, a WebCorp playlist. And it was essentially this random assemblage of vaguely electronic, vaguely digital songs that came from just completely different time periods and genres. There was like Meet Computer who does DigiCorps rap. There's Apex Twin, IDM from the 90s, TemperX, which is like Urban Outfitters Dream Pop,

like stuff that really has no business being next to each other. And they had this playlist. And my theory is that they just saw that this was a buzzword on like TikTok and Pinterest because it's like, it's essentially like a viral mood board like Cottage Corps or, you know, dark academia. Cottagecore and dark academia are aesthetics that both blew up on TikTok. They refer to fashion and lifestyle choices more than music. Cottagecore is this pastoral fantasy. It's usually used to describe milkmaid dresses and gardening. Dark academia revolves around classic literature and higher education.

It's inspired by Gothic architecture, collegiate tweed blazers, and melancholic books. Again, not really anything to do with music. But Spotify has playlists for Cottage Corps, Dark Academia, and pretty much every subculture you can think of. Just like WebCore. It's just like a very blurry collage of vibes. and Spotify made this, they hand curated this playlist that had no information about what it was.

It was just like a picture and the tagline was like, would you like to save before closing or something and then these songs? And it got really big, really fast. People were saving it. And I noticed on Twitter that people were starting to talk about WebCore as a genre,

they were like, I love this WebCore song. And I'm just like, this is not real. This is, you know, this is a sciop. And I think it really illustrated Spotify's power, like in this sort of doth of real journalism happening, like people look to Spotify as like the guide. It wants to capture every single audience possible and also capture specific audiences, hyper-specific ones so it can feed them back hyper-specific targeted ads, feed them back its own version of the culture.

which it can then better market. It feels to me like an attempt to create culture where there isn't. There are organically made microgenres that are defined by their visual aesthetic as much as their sound, like Vaporwave, which emerged in the early 2010s. It takes dance music from the 80s and 90s, strips it back, and reworks it into a slower, heavily synthesized version. And visually, it takes a lot of inspiration from the neon page. and purple motifs that were popular back then.

But like the music itself, it's distorted and reworked. That was a real scene. That was a community that was musicians and visual artists who thought they were making something really new and weird. And they really identified with that world and trying to kind of build out lore and like paratext for what they were making. And it's not even like what Spotify is trying to do with a lot of these things like hyperpop.

and webcore. It's not like it really wants to nourish the scene and take care of it. Like maybe someone at Spotify would say that. But to me, it feels like marketing tags. And it feels like a way for them to organize data and a way for them to make music more intelligible to algorithms so they can feed it to people. And so there is that, to me, like, you know, in empathy gap or like a meaning, a thought gap in what like vaporwave pioneers were doing and what Spotify is doing. And I think it's funny

because you could think, I mean, WebCore almost sounds like a synonym of vaporwave. And it's like just like the drastically different sort of like ideas of what they are, I think really makes like the shallowness of WebCore clearer. And Kieran says it's not just Spotify by itself, but the way that the attention economy and profit drive internet culture today. like how Spotify's microgenres and TikTok virality are deeply intertwined. It's hype cycles, right? It's like ephemorality. It's like the way that these platforms, the way they need to function in order to, you know, get enough views, get enough of people using their platform regularly. Like they need things to be exciting all the time. And so the way that like TikTok and the algorithm works,

and you can apply this to even other like to Instagram and to the way that like shit post pages will christen a new rap star every week now. It's like you need to feel like there are new trends popping constantly. A million genres and nothing sticks, both because like people are already moving on to the next one. They're already tired. And because the artist themselves, there's no incentive to take a long time anymore. You need to be constantly creating content. The rapid pace of TikTok feeds into spot. Spotify's system where it's always recommending you new things, where you always feel like it's exciting and new. And it creates this like endless feedback cycle.

What are the costs of this? I mean, like the beautiful power and the beautiful positive of Spotify is that you get everything, right? Everything in the world. You go, let's do it's an endless buffet. And so there's really, it gives you little reason to like want to venture out of that. and to go and actually research music and like why something is the way it is. And so when the platform like puts it into its own little box without any information about it, you don't even like, it's like you lose sort of the fundamental, the fundamental essence of why music is so great, I think, which is like the humanity behind it,

like the community surrounding it, like the real life feeling of it. Genres themselves aren't inherently bad. I actually used to use every noise at once to find new music. But in 2023, Spotify laid off Glenn McDonald and cut off his access to the internal data required to update the site. And earlier this year, he announced that Spotify had switched to tagging genres using machine learning instead of human supervision. So all of those issues we talked about with microgenres, the lack of nuance and context, they're even more pronounced now. As the platform relies more on machine learning than human curators, its playlists are becoming more and more personalized. If you search for microgenre names now, you'll probably see something called a mix. These are algorithmically generated playlists that are based on your own listening history.

My hyperpop mix is full of songs that I've already listened to, which aren't even hyperpop. These personalized mixes are even more divorced from the genre's origins than the editorial playlists ever were. So how do you break out of the algorithm bubble and find new music? It's easy to let curiosity atrophy when content is just served to us. But being actively curious about music is the first step. There are very simple ways to exercise your curiosity. I like Spotify's fans also like. That's like one good feature on the platform.

I've found cool artists that way. I think I do love like going to the bottom. and like user-generated playlist, like, they show up on artists' profiles. And oftentimes, if you go beyond, like, the first few basic ones, there are some intriguing ones usually that, like, are kind of like a look into a random person's taste profile. Quinn says she used to rely on Spotify's editorial playlist to find new music. Until she figured out how to break out of her algorithm bubble. When I find an artist, I go into their similar artists and I listen to their music and so on and so forth.

I go on YouTube, I look up like any interviews they made have had because I like to hear like artists. I would like to hear what they're talking voice sound. Like I look up if they had like any sort of performances that I might like, especially if they're bands. They should turn their YouTube algorithm into a music algorithm. That would greatly help. There's plenty of YouTubers that are constantly making videos about new genres and like new sounds and shit like that. And documentaries as well. Documentaries are fire.

And despite her complaints about the platform, Quinn says she has Spotify to thank for launching her career. Honestly, without Spotify, I would not be able to have a living wage off of music. So, fired. Awesome. However, pay me more. That's really just that that's really the only I can think about it. She says that algorithm bubbles are not, AI recommended playlists or not, dedicated music fans will always find a way to explore and discover something new. If you look to these AI models and if that's all that is popping up on your shit, then you are probably not, you didn't go deep enough, you know, you're not as, you didn't submerge yourself as much as you want to. And I don't blame people for that because like you said, it's tough to, to even get to the good shit,

you have to get through an army of AI-created playlist. I'd say anybody who really wants to search are, I don't think they'd stop at just seeing a bunch of AI playlists. So break out of your algorithm. Okay, now let's close all these tabs. Close All tabs is a production of KQED Studios and is reported and hosted by me, Morgan Sung. Our producer is Maya Kueva. Chris Aguza is our senior editor.

Jen Chean is KQED's director of podcasts and helps out of the show. Original music and sound design by Chris Agusa. Additional music by AP. Mixing and Mastering by Brendan Willard. Audience engagement support from Mahasanaad and Alana Walker. Katie Springer is our podcast operations manager, and Holly Kernan is our chief content officer. Support for this program comes from Be Wrong Who and supporters of the KQED Studios Fund. Some members of the KQEE podcast team are represented by the Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco, Northern California Local.

Keyboard sounds were recorded on my purple and pink, dust silver K-84 wired mechanical keyboard with Gatoron red switches. If you have feedback or a topic you think we should cover, hit us up at close all tabs at kQED.org. Follow us on Instagram at close all tabs pod, or drop it on Discord. We're in the close all tabs channel at discord.g slash KQED. And if you're enjoying the show, give us a rating on Apple Podcasts or whatever platform you use.

Thanks for listening. Support for a Key QBD podcast comes from Xfinity. Thanks to the Xfinity five-year price guarantee, your guaranteed five years of reliable Wi-Fi with our best equipment, no annual contracts, and no fees. Plus, get online in minutes with same-day Wi-Fi. Lock in your price and unlock the possibilities. Xfinity, imagine that.

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