The Sound of New Isolationism
12–01–21Visual system for music categorization.
By the end of 2019, I was informed by Spotify that my second most listened genre that year was "New Isolationism," something I had never heard of before, yet eerily accurate. As it turned out, the term first surfaced in the 1990s and was used to describe a certain kind of ambient music. It was more recently incorporated by the software engineers at Spotify, giving it a whole new meaning by enhancing it with algorithmically processed user data. Many other genres surfaced around the same time, such as "Escape Room," or "Hyper-pop."
Algorithmically generated genres are not genres in a classic sense, which generally describes a set of music that sounds similar; rather a rough sketch of a type of audience who is listening to the same set of music — a description for a demographic. After all, they are based on user data - collective unconscious materialised.