Spotify; A company run by people who know nothing about music running the biggest music streaming service of all time time. I’ve been using Spotify for years and I’ve downloaded ~3100 songs that I’ve personally listened to and enjoy. But let’s just talk about the god awful genre labeling system.

I was scrolling through the Spotify’s automatically created Shoegaze playlist because I was bored and I ran into the most blatant wrong case of labeling in my life. 2 examples of popular songs mislabeled as Shoegaze by Spotify are;

• “Stop Whispering” by Radiohead

• “Never Meant” by American Football

Radiohead’s Pablo Honey era was alternative rock and American Football’s LP1 was math rock / Midwest emo making the Shoegaze label on these songs completely wrong.

Spotify also labels lesser know songs by post rock bands like; Toe and a picture of her as shoegaze. This extends to mathcore to which bands like Greyhaven and Hail the Sun being incorrectly labeled as shoegaze.

This doesn’t just apply to shoegaze but other indie genres like regular math rock bands such as This Town Needs Guns [Or TTNG] Chon, and Covet being labeled as mathcore.

This is personally not an issue for me because I use different resources for finding music but this can be potentially harmful for people who only listen to mainstream music who wish to dip their toes into more indie genres but they don’t know where to start. These people would most likely immediately go to Spotify automatically generated playlists because they trust Spotify.

Even though indie genres are not going to make them nearly as much money as their big pop stars they should actually put in effort to show they care about indie genres. Right now the way they’re mislabeling indie sound like this shows they don’t even care about indie music. The indie scene already has issues with not being able to make enough money through streaming specially through Spotify and the blatant mislabeling is just a kick in the dick