As of 2026, there are something like 250 million songs available to the streaming music services. How do we even begin to wrap our heads around a number like that? Well, the first thing we do is attempt to put things in some kind of order.
That begins by sorting things into piles. Everything in each pile has something in common when it comes to sound, aesthetic, style, feel, and so on. [e’ve just taken our first step toward classifying songs into genres.
These piles are still too big. Each pile itself needs to be sorted into smaller sub-piles as our organization project continues. Then those smaller piles need to become even smaller, and more targeted and specific. Rinse, repeat until we have thousands of piles. We can get infinitely granular.
There’s a website called “Every Noise at Once” that tried to do this with a scatterplot diagram. It was created by a former employee at Spotify named Glenn McDonald, using all the names Spotify gave to songs to educate its music recommendation algorithm.
Glenn was laid off from Spotify at the end of 2023, so he no longer has access to Spotify’s classifications. But the site is active, featuring somewhere around 6,500 different individual and specific genres of music from around the planet.
I love these names. Truck-driving country. Swamp pop. Cantautor (no idea what that is, but it’s something Latin). Cavernous death metal. Finnish tango.
I was poking around “Every Noise at Once” the other day. You know, just looking for something interesting.
Buried in the upper third of this amazing website is trip-hop. It’s next to Indonesian hyperpop, Cape Town indie, and C-pop girl group. Click on the arrow next to it, and another scatterplot opens up, featuring an array of artists who have been tagged as being part of the trip-hop universe. Portishead was here, of course. So was Massive Attack.
But the more I looked around, the more I realized that there was more to this genre than I thought. This deserves some exploration.
Welcome to the story of trip-hop.
Songs heard on this show:
- Portishead, Glory Box
- Afrika Bambaataa, Planet Rock
- Massive, Any Love
- Massive Attack, Unfinished Sympathy
- DJ Shadow, In/Flux
- Tricky, Aftermath
- Portishead, Sour Times
- DJ Shadow, Best Foot Forward
- Massive Attack, Angel
- Massive Attack, Teardrop
Here’s Eric Wilhite’s playlist.
The Ongoing History of New Music can be heard on these stations:
- 102.1 The Edge/Toronto – Sunday night at 7 p.m.
- Q107/Toronto – Sunday night at 9 p.m.
- Live 88-5/Ottawa – Saturdays at 9am and Sundays at 6 p.m.
- 107.5 Dave-FM/Kitchener – Sunday nights at 11 p.m.
- FM96/London – Sunday nights at 8 p.m.
- Power 97/Winnipeg – Sunday nights at 10 a.m. and 10 pm..
- 107-3 The Edge/Calgary – Sundays at 10 am. and 10 p.m.
- Sonic 102.9/Edmonton – Sunday at 8 a.m. and 8 p.m.
- The Zone/Victoria – Sunday at 9 a.m. and 9 p.m.
- The Fox/Vancouver – Sundays at 10 a.m. and 10 p.m.
- The Goat Network/Interior BC
- WAPS/WKTL The Summit/Arkon, Canton, Cleveland, Youngstown – Mon-Fri at 9 p.m.
© 2026 Corus Radio, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.
Ad Choices
