Introduction

I’m a TV series fan, you know that. One of the latest best product of this field in Italy is the so called Gomorra La Serie series. It is a crime drama series, based on the homonymous book Gomorra.

I must admit that I’m really not a fan of drama series (except for Breaking Bad maybe, can we define that a drama series?). It happens, however, that I’m a musician (not a good one, tho) and what I liked the most in Gomorra was the original soundtrack (OST). That is, the OST of the series is made by an Italian band called Mokadelic. And guess what? They are a post-rock band!

Well… what’s post-rock? Is that a music genre? Is a new way of expressing ourselves by doing kind of weird music? Is something that you can eat? According to Last.fm, post-rock is not a kind of food but

Post-rock music uses rock instrumentation but disregards typical “rock” song structure. Mostly instrumental, a typical track features quiet arpeggios around simple chord progressions that swell into rousing crescendos. Fans liken the style to the avant-garde with soundscapes similar to that of “classical” music, while detractors counter that most modern post-rock is just pretentious, bloated noodling on a basic format.

I really like post-rock, it is like all of the music I listened to and I liked are fused together in a new sound. Artists such as Explosions in the Sky, Maybeshewill, Godspeed You! Black Emperor and The Album Leaf are capable of creating a sound which directly hits your feelings and makes you feeling like a sentimental bag of candies (and I’m so proud of being so!).

I often listen to post-rock when I work, study, read or walk somewhere. Thus, the idea of combining computer science and post-rock surely appeared out of the blue. I asked myself whether there was something interesting to do about and I came out with two main ideas, mainly

try to characterize a subset of post-rock artists by analysing their tracks and albums, maybe discovering some patterns or relationship, as I am a music devourer, try to enlarge my horizons and discover new artists related to the post-rock giants by creating a network of post-rock artists and exploring them by reaching the frontiers.

This articles is a two episodes series, composed by two different post. In the current one, I illustrate the results of a survey I made on the Internet, in order to characterize a subset of post-rock artists from which I could start for the second part. In the next one, I will show two main things, that are (i) the analysis of tracks and albums of the subset and (ii) the characterizing of the post-rock worlds by using the underlying network of artists/bands presented in Spotify (yeah, this is an article about scraping Spotify!).

Let’ start with the first part!

The data or “how I bored people and stressed Spotify”

The two main ideas (the characterization and the network) are strictly correlated. In order to popolate a network by exploring Spotify, I needed a subset of post-rock artists that could be representative of the post-rock world by a degree of certainty. This step can not be automatized without already having a dataset, thus I made the only possible and logical thing: I asked humans!

I’ve made a online survey by Google Docs in which I asked to write down 10 post-rock artists in order of preference. I linked the survey on reddit and various Facebook groups about post-rock. In the acknowledgments of this post, you can find all of the nicknames of the people who participated to the survey!

For the second part, I navigated Spotify by starting from the artists gathered by the survey and I took their relates: we define two artists as related if the first artist is shown in the second one’s related artists or vice versa. The whole process was made by python and the Spotify API; I tried to be gentle, so for each request I waited for a certain number of ms, up to one sec. Remember that the network and its analysis will appear in the second episode of this article.

The first part or “what a nice survey”

Note that throughout the whole section I made conclusions or insights which follow the results of the survey. Obviously, they might not reflex the absolute truth.

The survey resulted in 169 votes for 229 distinct post-rock artists. Although these are just the results of the survey, we already have an interesting point of view of the post-rock world: there are at least 229 distinct post-rock artists! That’s not bad, considering the target of the survey.

Let’ see how the top twenty look like:

Top 20 post-rock bands by survey.

That’s cool! We clearly see that the first three are Goodspeed You! Black Emperor (with 106 votes), Mogwai (105) and Explosions In The Sky (104). Moreover, in the following three positions we have the This Will Destroy You, Mono and Sigur Rós each with 73 votes.

What about a pie chart? Yeah, I know, pie charts are evil for storytelling, but in this case I like it for one simple reason: it is easy to understand the distribution of each top twenty artist with respect to the total votes.

A post-rock pie.

We see that the 30.5% of votes went to other different artists! Here’s the complete list:

Lost In The Riots, Ziriphon Fireking (thailand), Athletics, Balmorhea, Lis Er Stille, Talons, Shield Patterns, The For Carnation, Low, Dorena, Battles, Labradford, When The Light Dies, Joy Wants Eternity, Bells, Exxasens, Mono (japanese), Mutiny On The Bounty, We Stood Like Kings, Final Days Society, The Allstar Project, Félperc, Wang Wen, Aesthesis, Spoiwo, Paint The Sky Red, You Slut!, World’s End Girlfriend, Scraps Of Tape, Sunn O))), Frames, Silver Mt Zion, Iliketrains, Astralia, American Football, Hrsta, Ttng, Brainbow, Ascent Of Everest, Codes In The Clouds, Thisquietarmy, Les Discrets, Some Pink Floyd, Cleft, Fly Pan Am, Audrey Fall, Celestial Wolves, Low Frequency In Stereo, Leech, Pg.lost, Harakiri For The Sky, Envy, Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra, M83, For A Minor Reflection, Motek, Stars Of The Lid, Alcest, Silver Mt. Zion, Jesu, Deafheaven, Gybe, Yume Bitsu, As The Stars Fall, Lift To Experience, This Patch Of Sky, Anatomy Of The Bear, Inspirative, Rosetta, Seely, The Best Pessimist, Message To Bears, This Is Your Capitan Speaking, Lymbic System, Red Sparrowes, The Six Parts Seven, We All Die! What A Circus!, Year Of No Light, Arab Strap, The Red Sparrowes, Spaces, We Lost The Sea, The Winchester Club, Oceansize, We.own.the.sky, Audio Leaf, Olafur Arnalds, Toe, Immanu El, Echoes And Signals, Rooftops, Jizue, Snezhinki, Giant Squid, Pelican, El Ten Eleven, Giants, Samuel Jackson Five, I Am Waiting For You Last Summer, Sonic Youth, Talk Talk, Cult Of Luna, Krobak, Hope Of The States, Amenra, French Teen Idol, Ohbtt, Industries Of The Blind, Lite, The Mercury Program, The American Dollar, Mouth Of The Architect, People For Audio, Baulta, Lights & Motion, Deadhorse, As A Marionette, Get Well Soon, Tycho, Slowdive, Years Of Rice & Salt, Man Is Not A Bird, Piglet, Te, Katatonia, The Saint Moving Hills, Daturah, Red Room Cinema, Set Fire To Flames, Her Name Is Calla, Go! Save The Hostages, Toundra, Collapse Under The Empire, Get Lost, Wire Avenue, The World Is A Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid To Die, Deftones, Lost In Kiev, Grails, And So I Watch You From Afar, Saxon Shore, Gifts From Enola, Cloudkicker, Tunturia, Crippled Black Phoenix, Codeine, Hundred Year Old Man, Kokomo, The Ocean, Lights Out Asia, Moving Mountains, Neurosis, Blackpaperplanes, The Album Leaf, Camera, Bark Psychosis, Silent Whale Becomes A Dream, Sumner Mckane, Isis, No Clear Mind, The Appleseed Cast, Mouse On The Keys, Tokyo Shoegazer, A Silver Mt. Zion, Our Ceasing Voice, *shels, Rachel’s, Thee Silver Mt. Zion, Follakzoid, A Sudden Burst Of Colour, The Evpatoria Report, Esmerine, Lakes Of Russia, Rodan, Elephant Gym (taiwanese), Waking Aida, Tacoma Narrows Bridge Disaster, Boards Of Canada, Maserati, Moonlit Sailor, Critters Buggin’, Lowercase Noises, Ana Never, Mooncake, Sleep Dealer, Clay, Evpatoria Report, So I Watch You From Afar, Jakob, Long Distance Calling, Bear The Mammoth, Dirty Three, Stories From The Lost, Helios, June Of ’44, This Is Your Captain Speaking, Tracer Amc, April Rain, Killbody Tuning, Hyakkei, Tarentel, Tides From Nebula, The Echelon Effect, The Monroe Transfer, Go March, Latitudes, Coldbones, Giardini Di Miro’, Endless Melancholy.

The average of votes for all of these artists is 1.95. If you’re interested, I wrote in bold my favorites! You can see that there are a lot of typography errors: to solve this issue, a bit of ETL would be ok.

Now, something interest: how are distributed the top twenty artists among the ten possible votes?

Well, that’s really interesting! Straightforwardly, GY!BE are more likely to appear as first or second vote, while EITS are more likely to appear as second than first one. If we look at Maybeshewill, we see that they are more likely to appear in fourth position. Note that GY!BE are really a strong preference, in the sense that whether they appear, they have been voted as first or second position, otherwise is more likely that they haven’t been voted at all!

End of the first part

Here comes the end for the first part. In the second part of this article I will explain how I scraped the Spotify network and what I have found.

Stay tuned!

Acknowledgments

Thanks to all of the following people: