I signed up with Spotify, wrangling an invite through the clever and canny approach of just subscribing to the damn service. I know 10 bucks is a lot of money compared to, say, free, but Spotify finally allows me to indulge in my favorite pastime after cardio pole-dancing: finding weird cover versions of songs I’ve already heard too many times.

I haven’t compared it to similar services, to be fair, but Spotify offers an enormous selection of cover songs. For instance, you could spend more than 24 hours straight listening to covers of “Stairway to Heaven.” None of them are by Led Zeppelin, but you can’t have everything. If I have to choose between the original “Stairway to Heaven” and a flamenco version, well, hand me that tiny, tasseled vest.

After you’ve listened to a few hundred dozen cover songs, you start to see some trends. While there are some truly brilliant covers out there, most break down into one of a handful of approaches.

1. The Cheap Rip-Off Version

These come on albums with names like Top Pop Rock Dance Hit Classics Playlist. You might think you’re listening to the original version of “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” — particularly if you’re distracted by a nearby asteroid impact — but if you check out the credits, it turns out it’s being sung by “Cindee Lawpurr.” But hey, most of the words are right and that $80 synthesizer almost sounds like a guitar if you don’t listen very hard.

2. The Lullaby Version

Once upon a time it was clever to take songs like “Highway to Hell” and “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and record them as jingly little lullabies. But now I assume they have two guys locked in a small office with a pirated copy of Cubase being forced to make a gratingly soothing version of whatever Lady Gaga and Katy Perry are churning out this week. As an added bonus, some publishers are re-releasing these self-same lullaby albums as New Age meditation albums. Clever!

3. The Lounge Version

Mention cover songs in a public place and within three seconds someone will tell you about Richard Cheese. He’s famous for releasing lounge-styled cover versions of songs from “Material Girl” to “Fell in Love With a Girl,” and he does well enough that he’s more famous than some of the artists he’s covered (anyone heard from The Toyes lately?). At any rate, a bunch of people are doing lounge covers, some of whom — like Paul Anka and Pat Boone — were into lounge before lounge was ironic.

4. The Bluegrass Version

At first I thought Hayseed Dixie started this trend, but it turns out you could listen to a banjo-fueled version of “Purple Haze” as far back as 1999. This one kind of boggles me, because there are literally thousands of bluegrass covers of various non-bluegrass pop tunes. To put that in perspective, you could sit down to listen to bluegrass covers one at a time, and not get up until you were thoroughly sick of bluegrass.

5. The Punk Version

These are pretty much what you’d expect: fast, loud and delivered with a sneer that would make Draco Malfoy jealous. Fun fact: There’s an album called Punk Goes Metal but not one called Metal Goes Punk. This means something.

6. The Sensitive Acoustic Male Singer Version

Jonathan Coulton pretty much summited Mt. Sensitive Acoustic with his legendary cover of “Baby Got Back,” but that doesn’t mean there aren’t plenty of similar treatments. For example, you can listen to a startling number of sensitive acoustic male singer covers of “Hey Ya!” I’m not sure they understand that “shake it like a Polaroid picture” doesn’t really come across that well when sung by a James Taylor soundalike (unless it’s James Taylor singing it — that would be awesome).

7. The Orchestral Version

There are a few great orchestral covers of pop songs — Walt Ribeiro is responsible for a bunch — but most of these sound like someone took the MIDI file for the karaoke version and set “lead guitar” to “violin.” Still, if your living room is infested with lovers of classical music and lovers of pop, you should be able to clear them all out with one album.

8. The Kid Version

I’m talking versions where the song is actually sung by kids. And I’m not talking the Vienna Boys’ Choir here. The worst of them sound like someone wandered into a kindergarten classroom and made everyone sing “All Star” at gunpoint. The most disturbing is a version of “Barbie Girl” where the female part is sung by what sounds like a 10-year-old girl, and the male part is sung by what sounds like a 50-year-old male former porn star.

9. The R&B Version

These are the best. They’re relatively rare, presumably because it’s a lot easier to program a lullaby into a synthesizer than to sing like Etta James, but they’re much more likely to be worth listening to than any other genre. It takes Aretha Franklin to make you realize that Eleanor Rigby was actually smoking hot.

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Born helpless, nude and unable to provide for himself, Lore Sjöberg eventually overcame these handicaps to become an mod, a rocker and a rod.