My music taste, as a star chart
Every artist in my Spotify library as a star, joined by the sounds, moods, traditions, producers and people they share. Click a star for a preview, pick a genre to change the vibe, or ask for the bridge between Bloodywood and Alcest. An early map that keeps growing as more of my library is ingested.
What hooked me
My playlist "Stuff of awesome" is 602 tracks of things that should not sit together: Toehider next to Bloodywood next to Alcest, Swedish melodic death next to synthwave next to a children's metal band in dinosaur suits. Genre tags flatten that into "metal" and stop. I wanted to see why it hangs together: which threads of sound, mood, tradition and people run from one corner to another.
What I built
A star chart in three.js, styled after the sci-fi star maps I love. Every artist is a star raised on a stem, sized by how many tracks they have, set in a genre sector of the disc and coloured by family. The well-connected heart of my taste sits in the middle, and the strange stuff drifts out to the rim.
- The links. Each line is explained and labelled by where it came from. Green is Spotify credits, blue is researched fact (members, guest spots, producers, labels, scenes), amber is interpretation (shared traits like folk instruments, long-form storytelling or big choruses). Trait links need real evidence and are capped, so no single band becomes everyone's neighbour.
- The bridges. Pick two artists and it finds the path between them. Today Bloodywood to Alcest runs through BABYMETAL, Em Beihold, Devin Townsend Project, Anneke van Giersbergen and Radiohead, and the route shifts as the map grows. The bridge view stands the great connectors up as axes, ringed with a band for every genre they tie together. Devin Townsend touches seven.
- The research. A layer of a thousand sourced production credits turned up hubs I had never noticed. Jens Bogren mixed or mastered eighteen of the bands I love, across prog, melodeath and black metal.
- The rest. 30-second previews, genre "vibes" that recolour the whole map, collection layers, a link-strength floor, and stars that rise into place when the page loads. It runs on Cloudflare Workers.
What I learned
Spotify's developer platform is not what it was. A new personal app now reads only playlists you own, gets no genres, and earns a full day's lockout if it hurries. Folders are invisible to the API altogether. So the ingest is slow and polite, and the map is deliberately only my own playlists.
The bigger lesson is that the interesting part is not the data Spotify gives you. It is the interpretation, and interpretation needs sources and a way to be corrected. Every claim on the map says whether it is a fact, a credit or my reading of the music.
It is early. Right now the map covers a handful of my playlists, and the rest of the library, around 540 playlists and hundreds of whole albums, is being pulled in and researched. The network fills in as it goes.