How Hyperpop, a Small Spotify Playlist, Grew Into a Big Deal

Initially, Hyperpop featured songs by 100 gecs and artists associated with PC Music, the experimental pop collective and label founded by the British producer, singer and songwriter A.G. Cook in 2013, and the forerunners of the distorted pop sound that’s become associated with the term. Szabo and her colleagues landed on the name after seeing it come up in metadata collected by Glenn McDonald, Spotify’s “data alchemist,” whose job is finding emerging sounds on the platform and classifying them into “microgenres.”

Over email, McDonald said he first saw the term applied to PC Music’s releases in 2014 but it wasn’t until 2018 that hyperpop qualified as a microgenre: “For our categorization purposes it was mostly a matter of waiting to see if enough artists would coalesce around a similar ebullient electro-maximalism.”

Some of the artists in the scene seemed to resent being grouped together under an arbitrary genre term by a big corporation. While some of them make electronic pop in the vein of PC Music, others are more inspired by online rap movements. The name started to become a meme — “hyperpoop” jokes abounded on Twitter — but the springboard the playlist provided was undeniable.

Almost overnight, osquinn watched streams of “Bad Idea” climb into the hundreds of thousands. (On Spotify, osquinn’s music is listed under P4rkr, the name she used before coming out as transgender in April.) The song performed so well on the playlist that two weeks after 100 gecs’ takeover, Szabo and the other editors put her on its “cover,” the lead image at the top of the page.

If osquinn has become hyperpop’s most visible star, then glaive, also 15, has had the fastest rise of any artist in the scene. He began recording his first songs at the start of quarantine, at first inspired by the emo rapper Lil Peep, before finding artists in the hyperpop scene and quickly moving on to a brighter, more up-tempo sound that emphasizes his intricately layered vocals.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/10/arts/music/hyperpop-spotify.html