I recently made Spotify playlists for all the music I “strongly like” (or better) by each of my favorite musical artists. That makes it easy to tell how many minutes of music I strongly like by each of them, so now I can rank them by that metric.

This metric’s biggest downside is that it can’t track enjoyment differences within “strongly liked.” E.g. if I had to choose between the 3.5 hours I strongly like from Foals and the 0.5 hours I strongly like from Erik Satie, I’d choose the Satie.

But still, I like this as a measure of my “favorite” artists, because:

• I didn’t know in advance how the ranking would turn out.
• It tracks something central: how much music did they make that I strongly like?

I’ve put a few clarifications in a footnote,¹ and now here’s the ranking (I’ll update the spreadsheet occasionally):

A few observations (also updated occasionally):

• This list is very different from what I would’ve said in response to “Who are your favorite musical artists?” before constructing this list. But when I look at each one, I think “Oh yeah, I do strongly like all the music on this playlist!” So this exercise was eye-opening to me.
• This ranking privileges musical artists who are highly prolific and write long pieces, e.g. classical and jazz over rock/pop. But this is a feature not a bug: the classical and jazz artists really do compose more minutes of music I strongly like as a result of being more prolific.
• I’m surprised by how diverse the genres represented at the top are. I would’ve expected my tastes to be more concentrated at the very top, rather than including not just jazz and contemporary classical but also e.g. psychedelic pop, post-rock, prog rock, industrial, electronica, a singer-songwriter, tribal ambient, art pop, jungle, and even musica festera (a genre I hadn’t heard of until 2026).
• Many of these artists are probably unusual choices for “favorite” artists, but only a few of them are truly “obscure”: on this “>5hrs” list it’s mainly Vampire Rodents / Ether Bunny, Birdsongs of the Mesozoic, Spring Heel Jack, Oscar Navarro, Ghost Rhythms, and Jean-Philippe Vanbeselaere (each have <1000 monthly listeners on Spotify).
• After >20 years of listening to a huge variety of music fairly comprehensively, I am still discovering new favorite artists! For example, I didn’t discover these favorite artists until 2025 or later: Elena Kats-Chernin, Michel Camilo, Francisco Valor Llorens, Gareth Coker, Oscar Navarro, Alexandre Rabinovitch-Barakovsky, David Maslanka, Oliver Davis, and Jean-Philippe Vanbeselaere.

1. (1) I’ve rounded to the nearest 0.5 hours. (2) I typically only include one recording per track/composition (typically from a studio album), but in some cases I include additional performances by the original artist if they’re significantly changed from the original and I strongly like them, e.g.: some Phish live tracks, orchestral re-imaginings of Metallica tracks in the S&M albums, or live jazz performances that differ substantially from the originals while still involving the original composer (e.g. the high-speed versions of Miles Davis classics on Four & More). (3) For classical composers, I sometimes include later re-arrangements of their compositions either (a) instead of the original composition, if I like it better, or (b) in addition to the original composition, if they are now sufficiently “canon” (e.g. Ravel’s re-arrangements of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition). (4) Because of how jazz works, I often attribute an entire jazz album to the bandleader even if it includes a couple pieces written by others. (But if most tracks were originally composed by someone other than the bandleader, then I attribute them to the composer instead.) (5) The numbers here might not match what you see if you click through to a particular playlist, because I plan to continue updating the playlists as I listen and re-listen to music by these artists. (6) Film/TV/videogame composers are listed as “contemporary classical” if that’s their primary “style,” and for videogame composers who primarily wrote non-orchestral music I typically prefer a later orchestration of their music to the original tracks. [↩]