What’s playing at your favorite Bay Area music venue? Likely, some form of “indie” music.
The Chronicle analyzed more than 4,500 concerts that took place in the Bay Area since the start of 2020 to determine the common genres played at 27 popular music venues in San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley. The five most common genres were “indie pop,” “indie rock,” “pop,” “modern rock,” and “indie folk,” according to the music streamer Spotify’s classification system.
While the top spots went to familiar genres, things quickly got more interesting. The next five genres are much more specific, including microgenres like “electropop,” “art pop” and “stomp and holler.”
You might not know all of these genres. That’s OK, we didn’t know them all either. But they are easy to understand after you hear a few examples.
For instance, Charli XCX, who played two nights at Oakland’s Fox Theater in March 2022, is classified as “electropop” and “art pop” (artists can be listed under multiple genres). Those genres are exemplified by her popular songs “Beg For You” and “Hot In It.” “Stomp and holler” can be heard in the music of Wild Rivers, a trio that headlined a show at the Fillmore Auditorium in September, playing fan favorites like the folksy indie rock tune “Thinking ’Bout Love.”
The Chronicle obtained the concert data for this analysis by collecting information from concert discovery website Songkick. We then gathered Spotify genres for each of the more than 6,000 artists who played at the 27 venues we analyzed. Venues were chosen based on capacity (all were between 250 and 10,000), number of upcoming shows and the availability of data.
How does Spotify sort artists into genres? It’s a bit complicated. Spotify has nearly 6,000 genres and artists can belong to anywhere from 0 to 16 of them. According to Spotify, genres are created based on both how users group songs, like in playlists, and a mathematical…