Detectd Weekly: UK Acid

Acid Jazz has become maybe one of the most fluid genres of the last four decades, moving between Jazz, Electronic, Hip-Hop, Psychedelia, and Soul, and bringing out the best of all five.

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Over the last month, we’ve delivered everything from French Trap to Russian Indie and worldwide House to some COLORS-inspired R&B, but this week, we’re taking it back to the birth of a genre, seeing what’s been popping in the UK since the London club scene spawned Acid Jazz in the ‘80s and ‘90s.

So, let’s see how we can use Chartmetric data — and a little creativity — to make that happen.

Adding a Country filter for “United Kingdom” to our Artists tab returns around 23.5K artists, down from the 2.1M+ in our global database. That means the UK accounts for about 1 percent of the artists that we track worldwide.

Adding our Blues, Jazz & Standards filter cuts that 23.5K to just 894, which suggests that Blues, Jazz & Standards artists account for almost 4 percent of all of the UK artists we track. To put that into perspective, there are around 19.6K Blues, Jazz & Standards artists — i.e., less than 1 percent — in our global database.

Of course, that genre grouping is such a broad sweep of a number of different diverging genres that you’ll see everyone from Led Zeppelin to Miles Davis and The Temptations. Depending on what you’re looking for, it might not be too informative.

Fortunately, that’s why we have a Subgenre filter, which includes around 130 subcategories for Blues, Jazz & Standards. The first one up? Acid Jazz. Clicking that Subgenre returns 54 UK artists, which is still a bit much to sort through, so let’s filter some more with our Advanced Filters.

Since YouTube is the digital leader in global music consumption (even though it’s technically a video streaming platform), and it tends to cater to niche curatorial communities that spring up around user-generated content, let’s limit the bottom end of artist Channel Views to 1M. In other words, we’ll be looking at UK Acid Jazz artists with YouTube Channel Views that are higher than 1M.

That returns just 14 artists, which is the perfect amount for our playlists — especially since we’ll still have to sift through all of their songs to give our collection the right feel throughout.

Some of these artists haven’t released new music in years, which makes this playlist extra interesting, because it’s a mix of catalog (more than 18 months old) and frontline (less than 18 months old) just as much as it is a mix of an entire spectrum of Acid Jazz-adjacent artists, from Jazz to Electronic, Hip-Hop to Psychedelia and Soul. A remix of Morcheeba’s “Free of Debris” starts it off, and The Herbaliser’s “Hearts of Men” gives it a smooth finish.

It’s the kind of playlist that’ll make you want to take a night drive. For now, maybe just draw a nice bath.

Listen to this week's detectd on your favorite streaming platform here.