What makes reliving one’s year in music so appealing and enjoyable? In 2016—and in every other year—it’s all about the weirdness.
Every December, Spotify publishes a data-driven annual recap of individual and collective listening trends called the Year in Music. For 2016, the streaming service decided to take a slightly more subdued approach, opting for a one-off email campaign and a collection of playlists on the service as opposed to the colorful, standalone websites that we saw in 2014 and 2015.
If you listen to a wide-enough range of music on Spotify, some pretty bizarre genres can emerge in your year-end roundups. For instance, one of my top genres in 2015 was “dreamo,” an obscure combination of “dreamy” and “emo” that only came up on my list because I binge-listened to MUTEMATH’s discography (and no other dreamo artist) that year.
This year proved to be even stranger. Spotify’s delivery to my inbox yesterday afternoon revealed my top five genres of 2016: Indie R&B, Deep Indie R&B, Indietronica, Indie Rock, and…
The first thought that came to mind when I read that email: *Escape Room is not a genre.*I grew up playing tons of lo-fi, point-and-click escape-the-room adventure games online, so the term “escape room” carries a rather specific cultural significance to me that is completely unrelated to music.
I was further intrigued and confused when I found virtually nothing written about “escape room music” online. The “Escape room” and “Escape the room” Wikipedia entries refer to the physical and digital manifestations of the game, and do not mention music or sound. There’s an Escape Room Music Pack available for purchase from $58 (or for free on SoundCloud—see below), and its composer Jan Baumann gives some good tips on how to optimize music for an escape-room setting, but he doesn’t allude to any wider genre of the same name.
That being said, who am I to claim singlehandedly what does and doesn’t constitute a genre these days? Boxed-in genre definitions are a thing of the past; genre classification is no longer a fixed, top-down affair at the hands of senior A&R, marketing and creative executives, but rather a fluid, bottom-up phenomenon that relies more on crowdsourcing.
In fact, while you and I may have never heard the name, Escape Room is more popular this year than ever before—ranking in the 93rd percentile of all 1,482 genres on Spotify—and can’t be tied down to any particular geographic location, implying a more or less universal appeal.
If Escape Room is so popular, though, why doesn’t anyone talk about it? Does anyone even know what it is?
After some archaeological Internet digging, I found a partial answer in Every Noise at Once, an interactive “scatter-plot of the musical genre-space” developed by Glenn McDonald, a Data Alchemist at Spotify (via The Echo Nest). Every Noise maps all of Spotify’s genres and their [dis]similarities by pulling from the Echo Nest API, which characterizes every song uniquely along 10 internal indicators, including tempo, loudness, danceability and emotional positivity.
I experienced McDonald’s bottomless music knowledge firsthand last month, when he spoke on a music-tech panel I moderated at MIT’s Hacking Arts conference. He riffed candidly on technology’s ability to provide infinite shelf space and discoverability for music, creating an unprecedented global archive of otherwise niche and isolated genres (Norwegian hip-hop was one of his favorites).
Now, on this frigid winter evening, I decided to put his work with Every Noise to good use.
According to Every Noise, Escape Room currently ranks #107 out of 1,482 in popularity on Spotify, placing it snugly in between crunk and punk. On a granular level, Escape Room also sits in the 70th to 91st percentile for modernity (#434), femininity (#327), emergence (#260) and youthfulness (#126).
With regards to user behavior, Escape Room has a particular affinity for “passive listening,” ranking #538 in background and #944 in engagement (i.e. it’s in the top 50% of genres suitable for background music, and the bottom 50% of genres that attract intentional user interaction on Spotify’s service). Unsurprisingly, it also clocks in at #1375 for Christmas-ness, marking the genre “xmas-free.”
To dive deeper into the artist-members of the exclusive Escape Room club, I pulled up its artist map on Every Noise, which does indeed feature several of my favorite musicians from 2016—including KAYTRANADA, Anderson .Paak, BJ the Chicago Kid, TOKiMONSTA and LION BABE. A handful of the musicians on the Every Noise artist map have also collaborated with each other.