Whoever the official titleholder is, Spotify’s most prolific artist must surely be the dauntingly productive Various Artists, who emerges with a slew of new compilations and soundtracks and such every single day. One of the more underappreciated is surely Anonymous. “For most of history, Anonymous was a woman,” opined Virginia Woolf in Shakespeare’s Sister. Possibly, though my work on #ChoralMarch would lead me to guess that for most of history, Anonymous was a monk or nun or other an ecclesiastic(indeed, one of the few composers of early church music whose name survives is St Hildegard von Bingen
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Anonymous’ Spotify labours are preponderantly ecclesiastic, traditional, and children’s music. However, there are some interesting twists on Anonymity, especially in the top five streamed songs credited to Anonymous on Spotify.
So, here is Anonymous’ top 5 greatest hits on Spotify. Starting with Number 5, which is from an album of children’s songs and is originally from Bambi, created by the less than anonymous Walt Disney:
Here is #4 on the Spotify Most Played of Anonymous… except here Anonymous collaborated with some guy called Will Heard, whose anonymity is such he appears in a a music video for the song. Nevertheless, this is given by Spotify as number 3 in its top 5 streamed songs by Anonymous, so who am I to judge?:
And at #3…. an actual artist called Anonymous, from the 2007 Eurovision Song Contest, representing no less a powerhouse than Andorra (which does as well as Ireland these days – and in another inevitable outburst of national egotism, I feel compelled to point out Anonymous’s lead singer was born on the Island of Ireland)
Finally, with Number 2 we get more, well, Anonymous:
And Anonymous’ most streamed song on Spotify is, satisfyingly, in in Latin. And choral. And … hang on, it actually does indeed have a named author :
So there you go. Poor old Anonymous, overshadowed in his/her/it’s own Top 5 by named artists. Presumably this is due to various quirks of Spotify’s crediting. I have noticed, with classical performers, the composer will be credited as the main “artist” which can make it slightly difficult to track down the recordings of a specific musician.
As an added bonus, one of Spotify’s “This Is” playlists (which I assume are automatically generated”
An added added bonus here is Anonymous’ latest album (as of 14th August):
Séamus Sweeney 