The Sorting Project

Exportify pulled genre tags and record labels out of Spotify — fields the app never shows you. Claude read every row and found the collections hiding across five years of status reports.

1. 01

   Export the data

   Exportify, a free web tool, exported each playlist as a CSV — Track URI, name, album and artist(s), release date, genres, record label, and audio features per track. The genre and record-label fieldswere the key to the whole project: Spotify doesn't surface them anywhere obvious in the app, but Exportify pulls them into the CSV.

   Spotify caps uploads at 20 files at a time, so the 33 playlists were handed off in two batches — 20 files, then the remaining 13.

2. 02

   Filter with Claude

   For each themed playlist, Claude got the full set of CSVs and a target — a record label, a genre, an artist, or a genre + decade combo — then worked through the same five steps:

   1. Check for messy data first

      Before filtering, scan the actual values in the relevant column — every variant of a genre tag, every way an artist's name appears — to catch formatting inconsistencies a naive search would miss or wrongly include.

   2. Filter with exact-match logic

      Not loose substring matching. Genres are stored as comma-separated tags, so a track tagged “ambient jazz, free jazz, experimental jazz” matches on the exact tag “free jazz”, not on any tag that merely contains the phrase.

   3. Flag edge cases

      Dweezil Zappa was deliberately excluded from the Zappa / Mothers set — a different artist, however tempting the surname. Adjacent tags like “post-grunge” vs. “grunge” were called out rather than silently swept in or out.

   4. Check for duplicates

      The same song can appear in more than one of the 33 originals, so each themed collection was checked for tracks landing multiple times across source playlists — most had none or very few.

   5. Export the result

      A new CSV per collection, carrying Track URI, name, album, artist(s), genres, record label, and the original source playlist for each match.

3. 03

   Rebuild on Spotify

   Each resulting CSV was reviewed, then the tracks were manually rebuilt as new playlists directly in Spotify — the Track URIs made it easy to find and add the exact right version of every song.

All seven are on the shelf. The aggregate figures pulled while sorting — genre breakdown, most-featured artists, the longest and shortest reports — live on By the Numbers.