I want you all to know that I spent way too much time on this post. I chewed on this all day, wrote twenty different posts, re-visited the "Music Genre rabbit hole," -shudder- and edited to not sound like an a$$. (might have failed here) This is where I end up, for better or worse;
Over the years my focus on genres and sub-genres have shifted a bit more towards other classifiers.
While 'genre' is certainly important, it is much too rough and subjective to be the ring that rules them all.
You could even engage in battle with somebody about some song being pop or rock.
And personally I have never found good usage for 'mood' and 'occasion' tags.
They are also quite subjective and personal in my opinion.
Nowadays, as main entities besides 'genre' and 'sub-genre', I use tags such as: energy, valence, danceabilty, style, voicing. (voicing can be things such as male, female, choir, instrumental, etc)
Those are very useful for creating all sorts of playlists for different moods and occasions.
e.g. for when reading, 'instrumental', 'low energy' is nice.
Or, depending on your mood, certain combinations of 'energy' and 'valence' will give specific results.
etc.
I wish metadata providers would provide such info. That would be more useful than trying to classify a song or an album by only determinating some (invented) genre name.
I'm with you. Mostly?
You've invented your own set of names to classify your music; a personal taxonomy for your music. That's pretty cool, and I'm actually a bit jealous that you've been able to develop your library to that level of precision. That is waaaaaaayy too much effort for my musical use cases.
If I'm using music for background, I don't care about the details of the song, only the overall feel. I figure there's a fairly short list of moods I'd care about in this case. Should be fairly easy to get this close. The Last.FM tags I've seen with this are pretty much close enough for government work, and for me.
Sometimes I'm paying attention to the music. I'm either listening critically, or I'm doing something that doesn't require my full attention, and I want to listen to some music to help pass the time. Here, I either know what specific type of music I want to listen to, or I find it by flipping through my list. Once I find one, I want more of the same genre. I'm finding that if I don't agree with the Picard wikidata genre, I'm refining my understanding of the genre more easily than adjusting the tag.
My third method for using music is setting it up as a jukebox. Let people pick the tracks. I have now clue what criteria they use to pick. In this case, I can see your taxonomy being confusing. (Most of my friends have put zero thought into music genre. They just know what they like.)
I guess I have to include "Special use cases." The lists I've curated. Neither of our methods of classifying music would ever put these lists together. These are things like "my frisson list," "tracks that I think a specific person might like," "Tracks that remind me of particular things," or the one that just grows and never seems to shrink; "songs that I want to take a more detailed listen to." Almost forgot the all-important "Road Trip," and the "Kid-safe" list I refer to below.
I'm curious about how you use your secondary tags with new music. It seems like you have to listen and analyze every new track you introduce to your library. Maybe if I stopped getting bulk disc dumps I could do this too.
I actually have one for "Occasion" after a couple decades staring at the field! - That's where I put my "Explicit" tag so I can filter stuff out when my kid is around.
I've been using a "Whitelist" concept for playing music around the little one. I only listen to music that has been manually added to a playlist, or is from before the '80s. I haven't heard enough "coarse" language or overt enough themes in music from the seventies and before to be concerned. (Yes, I know it's there, but I feel like it's buried far enough under double-entendre to be acceptable.)
Anything from the '80s on needs a quick listen for swearing, and possibly content. Just because it doesn't have swear words, doesn't mean I want my little girl hearing it. I certainly don't want to have to answer her questions about what a particular lyric means, or have her repeat it at school. "Adam Ant" is a perfect example. While I love the "Strip" album, I really don't want to deal with the fallout if she starts singing the title track on the playground.
Then there's the whole "Clean" vs. "Explicit." I can't stand some of the "Clean" versions of explicit songs. P!nk did it right with "F***** Perfect." The worst is the obvious "Bleep" over the word, always jarring. Ideally I'd use lyrics, but I'm not going through all my tracks, getting lyrics and verifying "Clean" vs. "Explicit" in case I mis-tagged the track.
Besides, she'll be old enough, soon enough.