I wanted to explore Spotify’s metadata in a way that would model the interpretive messiness of generic categories. To do so, I built a program that bounces through Spotify’s metadata to produce multiple readings of the idea of genre in relation to a particular artist. Spotify offers a fairly robust API, and there are a number of handy wrappers that make it easier to work with. I used a Python module called Spotipy for the material below, and you can find the code for my little genre experiment over on my GitHub page.