Yes. This is – indeed – the place where we can go deeper into our little music experiment called The Sound Of Shtick.

This is the story: we are a team of several well educated, independent open-minds with different music taste. Instead of isolating ourselves with headphones, we decided to create a collaborative playlist on Spotify. Unfortunately, things got out of hand and our playlist contained both classical music, rock ballads, 90’s eurodance, Sergio’s latest hits, Dutch Schlager music, the entire discography of N.W.A. and stuff-we-thought-would-be-funny-to-add-to-the-playlist.

Marvin Gaye, J Dilla, Bonobo, Weezer, 2 unlimited and even QUOTSA in the mix with Earth, Wind & Fire, Nick Cave, Fatboy Slim, de Freestyle Fabrik, Daniel Romano and Bad Religion… it started of good, until we added too much crap.

Also, we used the Spotify shuffle modus to let fate decide what song to play next. For an unexplained reason,  some songs where ignored and others where played every hour. Strange. And annoying. Things went downhill. We were annoyed, pissed of, yes, even angry. Add some wretched-ass coffee to it and you can imagine the atmosphere at Shtick.

It got us thinking… What if we could combine all our music taste into one single playlist and force the whole team to listen to it.

Well, some dude created a website called Every Noise to create a bunch of playlists based on the snazzy algorithm used by Spotify to automatically tax a song by genres. It started as a joke and ended up as the experiment better known as The Sound Of Shtick.

Ah… the solution to our problem! Finally.

This is what happened. We combined our favorite genres – or sounds…

• The Sound of Glam Metal
• The Sound of Escape Room
• The Sound of Alternative Hip Hop
• The Sound of Ninja
• The Sound of Post Rock
• The Sound of Bebop
• The sound of Jazz Funk
• The Sound of Deep Deep Tech House
• The Sound of Skate Punk
• The Sound of Stoner Metal
• The Sound of Deep Soul House
• The Sound of Jazz blues
• The Sound of Slow Core
• The Sound of Old school hip hop
• The Sound of Indie garage rock
• The Sound of Hiphop
• The Sound of Soundtrack
• The Sound of Alt-indie rock
• The Sound of Noise Rock

… into one big playlist: The Sound of Shtick.

In total, it contains 7540 songs and takes 552 hours and 37 minutes. That’s more than 65 days.

Because we couldn’t trust the Spotify Shuffle, we had to play all songs from A to Z. That means we start with these beauties:

Until we finally reach the bottom of our little playlist:

While writing this post we’re almost finished with the letter S – and the 36 songs staring with the word she. Yes, we will share them with you.

So far – we had several meetings to discuss if we could stop torturing ourself. We even considered writing Spotify to adjust their algorithm, but came up with something better.

The highlight of our day is at 4 PM, when Slackbot goes like this…

..and we can request one song that is NOT on The Sound Of Shtick.

Because… genres, categories, classification of styles, quality songs and good music is something that CAN NOT be done by an algorithm. We can definitely agree on that.  We are wondering what to do when our playlist is finished – except dance around for a couple of hours and enjoy some moments of silence. Perhaps the only song we can play after The Sound Of Shtick is 4’33” by John Cage, the only song we can all enjoy and sing along.