Music Machinery

Given that it is a holiday today, I only had a short amount of coding time this morning. Still, I built something that is pretty fun to play with. It is a little tool that lets you explore gender and music.  With the tool, you can search for Rdio playlists via keywords and the app will give you the gender breakdown of the matching playlist creators. For example, if you type in ‘exercise’  the tool finds the top 200 playlists with exercise in the title and gives you the gender breakdown like so:

You can use the tool to explore gender biases in music. Some examples:

• 90% of Bieber playlists are by female listeners
• 81% of  heavy metal playlists are by male listeners
• 61% of love playlists are by female  listeners
• 70% of driving playlists are by male listeners
• 70% of cleaning playlists are by female listeners
• 95% of coding playlists are by male (!) listeners
• 100% of Mamma Mia playlists are by female listeners
• 88% of frat playlists are by male listeners

The tool was built using the superduper Rdio API.  Try the tool out here:   Gender Bias in Music