Tips / suggestions how to store global but tag relative information ?

[hiccup]

I like the concept. I would put the genre categories as columns in the column browser and have no problems playing any genre I wanted, to whatever granularity I want. Way better than using Auto-Playlists to group genres together.

It's very good that you point that out.

People might think this would all be some exercise for bored librarians, but I also wish for it to use as a new means to discover music in my library by exploration.
Music that otherwise might not be found and 'brought to life' by means of memory, playlists etc.

[Phaedrus]

I like the concept. I would put the genre categories as columns in the column browser and have no problems playing any genre I wanted, to whatever granularity I want. Way better than using Auto-Playlists to group genres together.

It's very good that you point that out. People might think this would all be some exercise for bored librarians, but I also wish for it to use as a new means to discover music in my library by exploration. Music that otherwise might not be found and 'brought to life' by means of memory, playlists etc.

Exploration has always been my ultimate goal with my library. Basically, I want to be able to find links between the music I like, and music sitting in my library buried in the "Filler" of another album. I envisioned starting with a song I like, and finding a connection to another song, just because I did a search for an involved person to find other albums they worked on. Like a session keyboardist who worked with a country singer, and a heavy metal band.

I got the lists, and they seem like a good starting point. I always tried to keep the main genres extremely limited; Rock, Jazz, Classical, Soul, Rap,  and World. My thought was that as I expanded my interest into a new genre, I would refine those as I needed. (Not much point having an entire main Genre Category dedicated to Reggae, when I only have one album of Bob Marley.) This is a bit of a paradigm shift for me. I'm going to run it around my head for a while, and see if it starts making sense.

No no, I'm on the same side I'd love to have a 3 layer genre mapping inside of MusicBee too. What do you suggest though - to have an additional dedicated subgenre metadata field ? I've had a quick play, and as is, one can already multi-cascade genres (i.e. subgenre-> genres -> Genre category [and more/deeper if one would wish from the looks of things...]) as is inside of MusicBee's Configuration.xml too...i.e. and I now have 'Dancehall' as a 'Genre Category', which in turn is grouped under the larger 'Reggae' category as well... and, I've had a file that is exclusively tagged with 'Fast Chat' appear in the 'Reggae' category, passed through the 'Dancehall' genre category definition above. Although interesting (how much this already works, which I would not have expected...), looking at what this produces in some areas in MB, I'm not sure I'm going to go down this route... Is anyone using MusicBee's Configuration.xml in such a way already ? c.

I was not even aware that the configuration.xml could be used to modify MusicBee behavior. I must explore further. Based only on what you have reported, and what I have done with configuration files in the past; I agree with your reluctance to pursue this. It seems like it would cause other strange behaviors that you may not find immediately.

Off-Topic;
Love the human connections to be made on the internet. It's also nice to have evidence that I'm not the only one.

[hiccup]

I got the lists, and they seem like a good starting point. I always tried to keep the main genres extremely limited; Rock, Jazz, Classical, Soul, Rap,  and World.

If you are going through that list (but it would probably only be sensible to do that if there is a chance it could be used in MusicBee), note that the list is not intended as a librarian's guide to genre's.
It is a list, created to accommodate specifically for what would be possible in MusicBee.
For example, some entries under the column 'genre' could arguably be considered a sub-genre.
And some entries under sub-genre, could arguably be considered being a further refinement of a sub-genre.

Also, for this list I chose to use MusicBee's Genre Category feature to function more or less as 'genre' (or 'main genre' as you mention it in your reply), and there may be entries under sub-genre that technically should perhaps fall even one hierarchy lower (but would then drop of this list completely).
So, I have smuggled and stretched a little bit here and there, so to have a list that is sensible (not perfect or absolutely complete), and uses, and makes the most of MusicBee's available three level refinement.
(if this all would be implemented that is)