An Editorial by someone unqualified to talk about most things

As you can imagine, running a music blog is about 75% rummaging through Spotify suggestions, 31% procrastinating, 17.4% stressing over absolutely nothing, and 100% not knowing how to do math. Contrary to me having gone on record before airing my distaste for short form content (despite making an entire media strategy based around it), I have to concede and say that the “tiktok-ification” of Spotify and the ability to quickly skim through songs has made that job immensely easier. It’s a really easy way to catch a glimpse of a vibe before investing more time into it, which sounds great! And quite honestly it is great, but I do have one major gripe with this system, that being its hashtags.

Source: https://x.com/Owl_spark_/status/1466087004454719492

Spotify has a long history of just making up genres as far as I’m concerned, as brought to my attention by “Alt-z” showing up on my Spotify Wrapped 2 years ago, and seeing photos online of “Dream SMP” appearing on other people’s Wrapped despite that being a Minecraft series of all things. My latest and favourite example of this is the “Frutiger Aero” tag I found while on a search for new blog content. For the uninformed, Frutiger Aero is a post-Y2k aesthetic that gets its name from a combination of the Microsoft Aero style guidelines (notably used in the Windows Vista era) and the font family Frutiger. It’s a style that’s had some resurgence in the last couple years amongst Gen Z, partially because of it’s nostalgic link to the time we grew up, but also partially due to the sheer absurdity of some of the images that come out of it, ranging from vibrant, bubbly utopias, to my personal favourite: this sick as hell dog drinking Pepsi.

So if this is what Frutiger Aero looks like, what the hell does it sound like? Well, as per usual Spotify is just making shit up as it goes, but there are a few consistencies I’ve nailed down. More often than not, these are light-feeling spacy tracks often with (but not always, as apparently none of the songs I chose to embed in this article fit this point) drum and bass influences with some nostalgic dance sounds thrown in for good measure, and I’d love to sit and talk in definitive terms about the airy yet vibrant feel invoked by the songs that appear under this genre hashtag, but the problem is every 3rd song is completely outside of the criteria. While diving down this rabbit hole I also encountered things falling closer to the banners of bedroom pop, indie electronic, or even some very by-the-book hyperpop.

We live in a time where music is becoming so fractured by scattered influences that it becomes harder by the day to classify songs under strict genres. As an artist myself being asked “oh what genre do you make?” is the absolute bane of my existence because in the internet age you have the ability to pull your inspirations from so many places that the umbrella term genres are less and less fitting. This is how we’ve ended up with microgenres over the years, which some people have embraced in full and some have completely rejected as “dumb, made up, and dumb a second time just for good measure”. I fall somewhere in the middle, as I do believe that microgenres can make it easier to find the specific sounds you want, but what doesn’t make things easier is Spotify just making up random shit, pretending it’s a real thing, and then not even being consistent with the things that it puts under that term. Don’t let the song choices I’ve embedded confuse you because I tried my best to make them coherent to what I think this should mean. This tag on Spotify is a complete mess and an affront to God and David Bowie respectively, and I sincerely wish instead of doing this we could just wait for communities to coin terms before trying to force them into existence.

Closing notes: Spotify doesn’t pay artists for shit, their former CEO invested his earnings into arms manufacturing, they have done irreparable damage to the music industry by prioritizing quantity over quality, and worst of all they are dragging the good name of Frutiger Aero with this nonsense. For the love of god, make it make sense.