Glyn Barnes
I said in the OP it’s progressive with a small p (IMHO). Genre definitions can get tiresome and i would not even want to get into the labyrinth of "Prog" sub genres I have seen discussed in some quarters.
I remember when I first started to prepare to import all of my music into a new media player (MediaMonkey - highly recommended!
http://www.mediamonkey.com/ ). Now I have over 300,000 songs from about three dozen "major" genres (e.g., "Rock" or "Jazz" not "Pop-Rock," "Hard Rock" or "Fusion Jazz"). Whatever people think about classifying music, I really don't want my Classical tracks mixing with my Metal or Trance. So I did some research which turned into a MUCH larger effort! I ended up with spreadsheets tracking origins and derivative forms as well as types (like date based ("The 60's"), location based ("Canterbury Scene," "garage," "Krautrock"), before, after or emerging ("pre," "post" or "proto"), weight ("light," "heavy"), density ("hard," "soft"), updated ("future," "modern," "contemporary," "new," "neo," "nu"), how accessible it is ("abstract," Avant-Garde," "art," "experimental," "pop"), presentation style ("vocal," "instrumental," "acapella," "guitar virtuoso," "synth," "symphonic," "arena," "acoustic," "electric") as well as all the cultural, religious and just plain stupid types. Over 1,400 genres and subgenres (sometimes called "styles").
It wasn't long before I realized that there were some general patterns, but a lot of ambiguity as well as some questionable parentage! (With some people putting the "child" above or equal to the parent!)
I also realized that, as large as my collection is, I only needed to classify what actually needed differentiating in my collection (so I don't have any subgenres for Rap for example, heck, I'm not even sure if I
have more than a couple of albums I bought out of curiosity). So what I finally did was to create a couple dozen main genres then I put all of the styles and subgenres I find for a particular artist into a separate field so I can create custom playlists later.
Note that I've only broken things down by artist, but once I finally have everything imported I intend to go back while listening and revise albums as needed (since we all know artists that do something different like a holiday album, etc.).
Damn! I just noticed that I forgot to start this reply with "Hi," - LOL!