More about genres

[psychoadept]

Classifying things into genres is tough for me.  It's too abstract for me to quite wrap my head around.  I finally gave up on using any particular system, and instead I've been cross-referencing allmusic, last.fm, and wikipedia, then putting it through my own mental filters to come up with something that makes some kind of sense to me.

But I still wrestle with it, especially in the fuzzy areas.  For instance, there seems to be some consensus that Sufjan Stevens and Mumford & Sons could both be considered Indie Folk, but I would never think of them in the same category.

So I'm curious, how do other think about genres?  Do you tag with just one genre, or multiple?  How do you decide what genre(s) each artist will be assigned to?  Do you tag by artist, or by album, or by track?  What do you consider a genre?

[spartan]

I generally have given up on genres. I am never so specific that i think "oh, I want to listen to progressive trance and not chillstep."
So generally, genre tagging is useless to me. I tried forever just to have big genres like "Alternative", "Rock", "Pop" but it never worked out. Buying stuff from Amazon has different genres, etc.

So now I completely ignore it and just make playlists of what I generally want. Now that I have musicbee, putting on auto-dj is just as easy too. So basically, screw genres. 

[Bee-liever]

I use both genre and style(sub-genre) in my collection, allowing me to listen to stuff like
Rock >> Alternative Rock
Trance >> Progressive Trance
Pop >> Traditional Pop

As for Sufjan Stevens and Mumford & Sons, I would consider both as Folk, and in some cases Folk-Rock, but Sufjan Stevens is in the styles Experimental Folk, Art Rock and Leftfield while Mumford & Sons are Indie Folk, Neo-Bluegrass and Blues-Folk

I do think that genres/sub-genres are only useful if they help you to break down you collection for easier listening. If it's one big headache and you're not going to do much with them, don't worry about them. Just sit back and enjoy the music.

[greenday1987]

I've all but given up on genres also. A lot of stuff I've and imported into my collection doesn't even have genre tags and the task seems too monstrous to tackle giving all my albums a correct genre tag

[beeing good]

I just tag according to how it sounds to me, I usually know if something is blues or jazz or Indian classical or post-rock. I try to keep genre tags down to a small number but I still have 86 somehow. I tag genres on an album level usually, sometimes I will tag individual songs with different genres but only if they're very different from one another. I use multiple genres tags a lot, sometimes it is next to impossible to tag something accurately within the 86 tags I already have (like Moondog for example).

[psychoadept]

I do think that genres/sub-genres are only useful if they help you to break down you collection for easier listening.

This is my main goal, though I also want to have a sense of how other people use various terms.  But right now I have everything in one big pot, and given the range of my musical tastes that sometimes means I get Disturbed followed by Lesley Gore or New Agey chants followed by Suicide Commando, which is a little.... surreal.

So far my efforts have led to Classic Rock, Underground, and Classical as the most significant genre categories.

[beeing good]

Underground? What music fits that genre?

[jistme]

Underground? What music fits that genre?

I wanna know too...

Should I update my list? ;-)
http://getmusicbee.com/forum/index.php?topic=8987.msg52432#msg52432

[psychoadept]

Underground? What music fits that genre?

It was the best catch-all term I could come up with to cover Industrial, EBM, Synthpop, Darkwave, Steampunk... a variety of things, some of which are mainstream (Depeche Mode, NIN), but which in general are smaller acts in the goth/industrial scene.  Lots of stuff from labels like Metropolis, Nilaihah, Dancing Ferret, etc.  In short, things I tend to hear at the club I frequent.

[greenday1987]

You have a cool club near you. The only clubs I have near me play mainstream dance total shite

I used to have a tiny venue that had super cool live bands in a city 40 odd minutes train journey away but that shut down. Now I have nothing

[psychoadept]

Should I update my list? ;-)
http://getmusicbee.com/forum/index.php?topic=8987.msg52432#msg52432

Hmm.  I can find Industrial Metal, but not straight Industrial or Industrial Rock (whether there's a meaningful difference between Industrial Rock and Industrial is a question I haven't resolved yet).  I can't find EBM, or subgenres such as Aggrotech or Futurepop (though I've taken to lumping everything EBM-related into Industrial Dance, which is the term allmusic uses).  I would consider Darkwave and Synthpop to be subgenres of New Wave.  But I don't consider myself an expert on these things.  It's more like "how can I apply this category in a useful way?"

[psychoadept]

You have a cool club near you. The only clubs I have near me play mainstream dance total shite

I used to have a tiny venue that had super cool live bands in a city 40 odd minutes train journey away but that shut down. Now I have nothing

Sorry to hear.     Here's a fairly typical playlist, if you're interested: http://www.detroitgothic.net/index.php?showtopic=37455

[jistme]

Thanks for this input scampbll.
To not hijack or diverse this topic I gave some feedback here: http://getmusicbee.com/forum/index.php?topic=8987.msg54190#msg54190

[salome]

In my opinion genres are no so important, however I usually assign the music genre thath the artist play in my opinion, just for convention (es. melodic death metal, visual kei, dark ambient etc.). I tag only by album, using sometimes multiple genres.

[ThY]

I'm kind of a "musical genres addict" myself.
Since several years, when i have time/desire, i work on a huge "organization chart" à la "Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music", who totaly inspired myself.

The difference with mine is that i'm trying to cover ALL possible music genres, by trying to only keep genres that have musical specificities.
For example, i will not include stuff that sound identical but have different genre name just because they're from different region or part of a country.

This is what it looked like back in 2011. Click to enlarge !

I made this on a software called Xmind, but currently i'm in the mood of sharing my work on the web.

The problem was that Xmind files formats didn't allowed me to convert the chart in a web friendly format, even with the Pro version.
So, these times, i'm copying all i've done in Flash, to be able to navigate through the giant draggable/zoomable map, like in Xmind, and to have clickable genres that lead you to a Youtube video, with a listenable example of the genre.

But this is a huge amount of work that i want to do solo, it will certainly takes a more few years to post a decent version on the web, because i actually add more genres every now and then.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

To answer more specifically to the original post, i first wanted to classified the music i listen to, in the same rich way i was making my huge organization chart.

But in the end, tagging 16k+ files like this, was way too fastidious, especially as i wanted only individual tagging for my music.
So i have currently 15 main categories, spread in 128 genres. So i'm tagging stuff on instinct, and with genres covering more subgenres.

As an example, metal is the thing i'm listening the most, so it's spread like that:

-Battle Metal
-Black Metal
-Black Metal Folk
-Melodic Black Metal
-Casiocore
-Cyber Grind
-Death Metal
-Melodic Death Metal
-Doom Metal
-Folk Metal
-Grindcore
-Heavy Metal
-Indus
-Alternative Metal
-Atmospheric Metal
-Avant-Garde metal
-Gothic Metal
-Progressive Metal
-Symphonic Metal
-Metalcore
-Noisecore
-Nu Metal
-Power Metal
-Symphonic Power metal
-Rapcore
-Screamo
-Thrash Metal

Sometimes songs could be included in several genres, so i just make my decision instead of starting playing with multi-genres.
The purpose here is to be able to choose to listen to songs that have musical similarities, but in a relatively large way

So, as i listen more to metal than dubstep, i'd have more specific genres for metal than for dubstep, where i could have separated old dubstep styles, and current brostep derivatives, instead of just having a solo "Dubstep" tag