Share your best Spotify genre playlists!
August 2, 2015 4:52 AM   Subscribe

We had great Spotify playlists revolving around a particular genre on the Blue and Ask before, be it naju's huge 90s indie/alt playlist, the power pop playlist linked by Sonny Jim or mountmccabe's shoegaze playlist. Please help me find more!

My favorite use of Spotify is to load a playlist of a particular genre and shuffle my way through it. Sadly, aside from the above examples, I haven't found many playlists that would work for me: the search function brings up too many unloving or half-baked compilations, whereas Spotify's own genre playlists are trying too hard to please everybody and don't delve terribly deep into the matter at hand. With the above examples you can feel/hear that they are works of passion, by people who listened to a specific genre to an excess and are thus much more suited (for me) to discover new artists or even genres.

I want more of those.
Whatever the genre - everything is welcome, as long it goes beyond mere surface level genre introduction and/or most popular/obvious song choices.
Oh and don't shy away from sharing your own if you're a nerd in this or that genre.
Thanks!
posted by bigendian to Media & Arts (14 answers total) 63 users marked this as a favorite
 
I like Fuck Punk: New Wave 77-84, by Rhino Records-- but then I like Rhino compilations in general, so...

I also listen a lot to NME's Girl Group Bangers.
posted by frumiousb at 5:14 AM on August 2, 2015


I'm loving BBC Radio 1xtra's Essential RnB at the moment.
posted by ellieBOA at 5:26 AM on August 2, 2015


Don't know if this counts, but one of my favourite Spotify things to do is to listen to "19xx in singles" type playlists. Not greatest hits of that particular year, just samplings of what was released then. It's like going back in time and listening to the radio, unhindered by our taste perspective circa now. (Did that make sense? It's early in the morning.) User gcwright has made a ton of them.

I also like playlists for semi made-up genres like Too Slow to Disco.
posted by saltykmurks at 5:30 AM on August 2, 2015 [1 favorite]


Every known musical work by Mozart (is a week long). That blog post also links to some smaller Mozart compilations.
posted by jessamyn at 6:55 AM on August 2, 2015


Around 2008, I did a few shoegazey/indiepop/dreampop mixtapes and later moved to Spotify:
O Bolo ("The Cake" was a radio show that accepted playlist submissions)
Look at the Sky
City
Last year I sent a videoplaylist to a basic cable "opensource" TV Channel, and you can see it or listen to it.

And if "short length" is a genre, I did three with songs clocking under 150 seconds called "music for people lacking time":
Vol1, Vol2, Vol3

A few have missing tracks from the original playlists, although I've rechecked to see if they were available this time. I mean, I named one of the playlists "City" because it opened with Kevin Shields' City Girl, and the LiT soundtrack isn't there.
posted by lmfsilva at 7:43 AM on August 2, 2015


After I told him about the 90s alt rock playlist and wished there was one for rap/hiphop, my friend put together a 25-year chronological rap playlist. I only wish there was a way to allow annotations; he has a reason for including almost everything on that list from an influence perspective and will tell you why in exhaustive detail. It's awesome for someone (like me) who has (had) little knowledge of the genre outside of pop music.
posted by lilnublet at 11:11 AM on August 2, 2015 [1 favorite]






I love playlists featuring original versions of songs (especially when the cover is a much bigger hit than the original). Here's one of them.

Here are a few playlists I've made:
Originals and Covers (As it says: original version of a song followed by cover version(s).)
Familiar Tunes With Foreign Words (non-English versions of popular songs)
Politics and Protest (Protest songs and songs with political themes)
posted by SisterHavana at 8:24 PM on August 2, 2015


Random ones I've done:

Asian Space Pop - Mostly 60s' and modern-day psychedelia from Cambodia, but with a bit of Korean, Thai, Chinese, and Malaysian too.

ShapeNote - I got interested in Sacred Harp/Shape Note singing, so when you're in the mood for freakishly amazing choir work, this is where you can go.

And these two don't quite count as properly curated playlists, because I just grabbed entire compliation series and stuck then in there, but Space Age Pop and Ultra Lounge both fulfill my atompunk/retro/space-age lounge needs.

I also have Halloween and Christmas playlists. But that's to be expected, isn't it?
posted by Katemonkey at 3:00 AM on August 3, 2015


I am a total nerd for Scottish indie rock, so here is my Scottish indie rock playlist.
posted by banjo_and_the_pork at 6:23 AM on August 3, 2015


Response by poster: Woah, thanks to all of you for the great and diverse imput, I'm so excited about to listen to all of your playlists!!
posted by bigendian at 7:28 AM on August 3, 2015


I am glad you liked my shoegaze playlist!

I will mention my friend's Proto Metal playlist: URI - spotify:user:bmack86:playlist:2udNkmqbZwEVJpHg7bHPIb


Then there was a month where I only listened to Medieval and then Renaissance, more or less chronologically. I collected my favorites into these playlists:

Medieval: URI - spotify:user:1236893927:playlist:5H91HGnSkFKDIpjwfUV2gL
Renaissance: URI - spotify:user:1236893927:playlist:3JzTlmTW1N5YI3X3fbUcB0
posted by mountmccabe at 10:55 AM on August 3, 2015


I'm an inveterate Spotify playlist maker, mostly I guess as a kind of methadone programme for the Mefi Swap. Here's one I put together last week: Alt-gaze—shoegaze, predominantly, with a bias towards recent British bands and a bit of psych stuff thrown in.
posted by Sonny Jim at 7:59 AM on August 11, 2015


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