What is RnBass?

I haven't been DJing much in 2022 and there's a reason for that, but it's not something I want to go into right now.

What I have been doing is a lot of data analysis and since I work for an MLOps company it felt appropriate to combine my biggest passion with a stroke of understanding. So as a means of procrastinating what I should be doing I took the tracks added to my library in 2022 and 2021 and did some 3rd-grader worthy data analysis to breakdown what genres I've been consuming. This should answer a question that no one has asked, but I will answer: What's in an RnBass mix?

Truthfully, I shouldn't be surprised, yet I'm still shocked to see my growing kpop/krnb obsession reflected back to me in plain sight! It surpassed r&b as my top genre in 2022! 😳

Part of that is laziness - I have about 500 unsorted alt r&b tracks to add to my library and zero unsorted korean music. But if I were to peel back the curtain a little, I think there's been a convergence of my favorite genres in Korean music. Said another way, South Korea is producing some of my favorite r&b and dance music right now. Like I could go on about how New Jean's debut EP was full of 90's and alt r&b styled earworms. Or how Taeyeon came back with INVU and I streamed the song on repeat for an entire day. But if you've listened to any of my RnBass mixes, you know that I've been mixing this stuff since I started the kpop vdj series.

So what's in an RnBass mix? The backbone is a bunch of alt r&b edits with a healthy sprinkling of hip-hop, 90s, 00s, jazz-hop, afrobeats, baile funk, amapiano, and house. But I feel like the secret ingredient I try to sneak in without people realizing is krnb. Based on the trending of my library, I'll probably be doing pure krnb sets by 2025. In the future I'd like to backdate this analysis to 2009 so I can see how my music taste has evolved over the years. Maybe put my library metadata on Big Query and do a new yearly recap series in the blog?