I got the idea to scrape a few social media sites to generate playlists. Here’s one for Video Game Music, a thread about retro video game music and finding a neat track made me decide to write a script to automatically add things to a playlist. I don’t know if it’s really worth posting as it’s just the basic python script provided by Youtube, as the only real addition is a loop and logic to check for previous entries in the list, but the results speak for themselves: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL34nTXIAgkSmqyo-_2_xZwNgNfjLG_LbS
The list has a lot of modern stuff too, but my favorite is NES and C64 stuff, just because of the technological limitations and how they got around it – those two platforms have a lot of fast arpeggios where there would normally be a chord since they don’t have enough voices for chords. I think it’s an interesting effect and love how it sounds. SNES and Genesis sound hardware are a lot better but still limited, the lofi sampling on the SNES is interesting (see all the crazy sampling on Earthbound) and the Genesis uses FM synthesis which can do some really crazy stuff in the right hands (although that’s actually rare, as FM was all over 80s pop music, but only games like Streets of Rage 3 actually do anything unique with the technology.)
A lot of this music is kind of obnoxious – the only time it’s approached “mainstream” is people like Malcolm McClaren hyping “Chiptune” in the mid 00s. I can’t really think of any instances of it being popular other than that, maybe Crystal Castles but they are kinda long gone, and for good reason. I do like the band “The Depreciation Guild”, they managed to mix Shoegaze and videogame bleeps and bloops quite well.
I’m going to submit this post to the Youtube API quota bypass page, I can only add 200 songs a day which really isn’t enough. If someone from Youtube actually reads this, please approve me, lol. I just want to make playlists, of everything! Finding new music is something I love, and this makes it much easier. Please approve~