Listening to every Danish release on Spotify with web scraping

Broken

Every Noise at Once has sadly shut down, so there are no more weekly playlists anymore :(

Browsing the internet I discovered the fantastic website Every Noise at Once (ENO) which aims to classify and relate every single musical genre and provide examples through a complicated algorithm. I spent a long time browsing some very obscure genres, but I also discovered the new releases on Spotify by genre which allows me to see every song released in my home country of Denmark every week. This is interesting as the weekly new releases playlist made by Spotify itself consequently has tracks from several weeks prior and fails to add even a quarter of the releases showcased on this website.

I experimented using Spotify’s own API by their Get New Releases call but this provides the exact same results as their new releases playlist. I looked around on ENO, but was unable to figure out how these releases were pulled, so I did what every responsible person does in this situation and scraped the website myself.

Reusing the Spotify API I can then add these songs to a better new releases playlist which I may listen to in order to discover niche danish music. I titled this playlist Uhørbart which means unlistenable and is a play on the radio program P3 Uhørt (P3 Unheard) which regularly showcases newly released danish music. Below you can see the general flowchart of the program which is written in Python and uses the Spotipy library for API calls. The program is run every Sunday when ENO updates, and as such the chosen playlist is cleared before all the new tracks are added.

The name fits perfectly as most of the Danish music released on Spotify is garbage. I decided to make 4 playlists:

• Uhørbart: Alle: Has every song which ever appears on Uhørbart
• Uhørbart: De værste: The worst songs which Uhørbart has to offer
• Uhørbart: De bedste: Generally decent songs which I enjoy once and forget
• Uhørbart: De allerbedste: The very best songs. Good enough to make it onto my personal playlist.

In general, there is a ton of completely soul-less pop and rap music without any redeeming qualities. Most of them succeed and make a song which is certainly listenable but completely unremarkable. The distrubition among the playlist are roughly as follows:

• 5% of songs are mislabelled as danish and are disqualified
• 10% of the songs are so bad they make it onto De værste
• 5-8% of songs are good enough to go into De bedste
• 1% is good enough to make it onto De allerbedste
• The rest are unremarkable and therefore land only in Alle