Blog about My Genre

Always enjoyed your work on the Songs forum David, interesting read. Mind-boggling amount of genres these days.

Glyn Barnes
 
 
In my heyday in the early 1970's the pundits had not yet come to terms with the ever changing music and classified things into hundreds of genres. If i remember correctly alongside the more established Soul, Reggae, Folk and Rock and Roll bins most of what has become a zillion genres of prog, rock, metal etc was all filed under "Contempory" in most record shops.
 

 
I work in a record shop (my family's) and I can just imagine if we had to bother breaking it down into even 1/100th of all these genres haha. 

As (over) told elsewhere, I studied genres, subgenres and styles to help me categorize all the new music I was about to import to a new media player.  There were over 1,400 that I analyzed.
 
If I had a record store now, I would have 27 categories: A thru Z plus everything else!

Good thread ...

Yeah, you end up with some of the following labels: Ambient, Art Rock, Avant-Garde, Chill Out, Downtempo, Electro, Electronica, Experimental, Instrumental, Minimal, Minimalism, New Age, Orchestral, Soundscape, Synth-Pop or Symphonic.  All before adding any perceived style like fusion, progressive, trip hop, etc.!
 
The definitions for my own music collection are still being finalized, but I'm starting with four primary categories:
 
- Classical Music
- Easy Listening & Holiday (mostly inherited from my parents)
- Electronic (I don't use the term "Electronica" so this is where anything electronic or Psytrance goes)
- Music (for all music that doesn't fall into one of the other three main categories)
 
Someday I should probably add genres, subgenres and styles to the Classical Music category (like "Baroque," "String Quartet," "Requiem" or "Piano") and, quite frankly, I really don't care for most of the stuff in the Easy Listening & Holiday category but, for the other two categories, I use about two dozen primary "genres" for each. Then, all the extra, weird subgenres and styles (like death metal, shoegazing, math rock, psy breaks, etc.) get put into a subgenre field that I can search later to make playlists from. Note that I consider "Metal," "Progressive" and "Rock" to be primary genres, but "Progressive Metal" or "Progressive Rock" would be subgenres.
 
I'm sure I'll tighten things up a bit once all my music has been imported (so far over 170,000 songs out of over 300,000 are in), but this is working well for now.

*Pfft...* That's an easy one.  He is called the "King of Pop," isn't he? 
 
Groups that either change their primary genre or simply play lots of hard-to-define genres are the tougher choices.  Tangerine Dream, for example, could fit in a bunch of areas (from some of the best acid music, to film scores, to EDM, to some of the best soaring guitar, etc.).  
 
The main benefit I've noticed that a computer-based media collection has over a physical one is that I CAN put Michael Jackson into more than one place (dance, soul, pop for example).  So when I can't decide if I should put something in "A" or "B," I just put it in "A" AND in "B."
 
I don't know if you do this in your record store, but I remember one down in Southern California that had these record-sized pieces of white cardboard and would use them in alternate areas.  Using your example, they would have one in the Soul area that would say "Looking for Michael Jackson?  Check the Pop area!"

craigb

polarbear
I can't tell you guys how many people ask me what kind of music I make and my normal answer is "electronica" with an a and they say "Oh cool you're a DJ?" 

Meant to comment on that earlier.  I would reply with something like "No, most DJ's only play music, I create it so they have something to use." 

Haha and then just drop a mic and walk out of there.

I read a review of the latest Mouletts album where the reviewer seemed to be confused as he could hear four distinct genres, and it was only the first song.

hahahaha