Anna’s Archive have “backed up” Spotify and done some analysis on the metadata.
The moral debate about this aside, I love this chart from some of the analysis they provided.
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Anyone who wants to talk about their psytrance addiction?
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Interesting I wouldn’t have thought that psytrance is so high on the list I thought they would have much more artists from popular genres like rock hip-hop etc
And yes I am a huge psytrance fan but I don’t think this is the subject of this topic
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riddim has that many artists and all the tracks still sound the same…
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Nice to see opera in its rightful place
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The whole list is quite odd really, almost looks back to front.
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Fun fact, spotify collects much more information. It also analyse audio with (minimum) 11 audio features like loudness, danceability, positivness / valence etc.
Sadly you do not get access to this audio
features unless you good coding. I think spotify should provide all information of the audio features in the spotify for artists app
https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-api/reference/get-audio-features
I would not be surprised to learn that there is an unintentional but measurable phenomenon where the rise of spotify and psytrance making a comeback are interrelated events leading to an abundance of artists and content as well as a fanbase baked into the spotify algorithm going back to the early 2010’s or earlier.
Time to write my songs exclusively in Eb just to go against the grain.
It’s official - tango is more popular than minimal techno.
Agreed - Seems strange to me that more people listen to black metal than drum & bass, and that there are more listeners of ‘avant-garde’ than hip-hop. All I know is, if I’m taking the bus, I’d rather pop on some Dr Dre than Trevor Wishart.
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That’s not what the graph is about… it’s that there are more artists describing themselves as belonging to the genre… it does not say anything about listeners.
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Ahhh I see, whoops. 
Thanks for clarifying. I’m at work so skimmed past the context.
And asking people to tag themselves is bound to cause problems. “Oh, well, I’d call my genre Drum’n’Bass but I’m sure Black Metal listeners would like it too, so …”
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You’re not wrong but that still does not explain opera at the top. My guess? Spotifys metadata is all fucked up and full of errors. Or that Anna’s archive methodology creates interesting but flawed results. Or both, most likely.
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They can’t be more opera singers than artists in any other genre. That makes no sense 
Counting artists of a genre vs counting tracks of a genre.
If you have 100 opera artists realeasing 5 great peaces of music in a life vs you have 100 dubstep artists releasing 10 great tracks a year.
What does it mean? Does it matter? and for whom?
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What about space opera? Actually come to think of it, that’s not likely to have a singer at all, it’s all instrumental.
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The opera, choral and chamber music thing is confusing. Would have to look at the data to understand what Artist Count is defined as. A group/band or the composer or all the musicians involved. 