ESCAPE ROOM MUSIC – week two
Escape Room music is a genre created by Spotify’s data alchemist, Glenn McDonald in 2016. This genre of music appeared in some Spotify listeners’ top genres list, and with the unfamiliar genre, many were intrigued by what it was. According to an article on papermag.com, “rather than just running with whatever genre the record label or artist has labelled themselves as, McDonald developed an algorithm which evaluates music based on ‘subjective psychoacoustic attributes’”, meaning that he has grouped songs together within this genre of ‘Escape Room’ through what a song sounds like. This grouping relates to factors such as ‘tempo’, ‘duration’, ‘colour’, ‘modernity’, ‘femininity’ in addition to their danceability, the happiness the song exuded, or even how bouncy it felt. And by creating set genres, it was easier to sort through the extensive catalogue of music on the Spotify website.
[https://www.unpublishedzine.com/music/what-is-escape-room-a-deep-dive-into-spotify-genres]
The name “escape room” was made up by McDonald himself to describe a common listening pattern. Meaning that enough of a trend developed in enough people listening to all these same artists, that the algorithm went grouped these songs, which he created a genre for because he couldn’t figure out any existing one to apply. According to McDonald, ‘The vibe is kind of an underground-trap/PC-music/indietronic/activist-hip-hop kind of thing,” which he came up with ‘escape room’ “both for the sense of escaping from trap, and for the ideas of excitement, puzzle-solving and indoorness implied by the actual physical escape-room phenomenon.”
McDonald has a website called ‘Every Noise At Once’ that lists every genre of music, including artists of every specific genre you click on as well as including lists of other similar genres. On that website, other genres of music that have been listed to rank its similarity to Escape Room include hyperpop, trap queen and alternate r&b and hip hop, since these commonly include properties, such as using trap drum arrangements, the use of 808s, strong bass lines and all have electronic-influenced production. Within the Escape Room genre, there are well known artists, such as Lizzo, Charli XCX and Anderson .Paak in addition to artists including Death Grips, Rapsody and Katie Dey listed in the map on everynoise.com and mymusicstream.com. After listening to the playlist on Spotify that has been created to group all music that fall into this category of Escape Room, it is clear that this genre is influenced by pop and rhythm and blues and hip hop, having similarity in drum arrangements and electronic sounds.