Hey Guys,
 
I don't know how many of you have checked out the site Every Noise At Once (it's a really cool experiment to show all kind of genres and how they interconnect), but I just wrote a blog about it and my music and what it taught me about my music. I think it's something a lot of you guys would dig so figured I'd share.
 
http://www.bydavidrosen.com/2016/06/29/my-genre-of-music/
 
Enjoy.

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

jamesg1213
Always enjoyed your work on the Songs forum David, interesting read. Mind-boggling amount of genres these days.

Mind-boggling indeed. I will take some time to try to understand the mapping.
 
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.
 
Here is a conscise artical on the sub-genres of "Prog"
http://www.gepr.net/genre2.html

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. 

jamesg1213
Always enjoyed your work on the Songs forum David, interesting read. Mind-boggling amount of genres these days.

Thanks! Yea, it's crazy how deep it goes. It still makes me laugh that some of the genres I looked up on Google I couldn't even find. It's like people are coming up with their own genres for their music. That takes balls haha. I'm always so worried people won't find my music if it's not categorized perfectly (which is impossible to do anyway nowadays 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!

Haha A-Z plus everything else. Nice and easy :-)
 
Hmm... Let me think about our store... Rock, Soul, Blues, Gospel, Soundtrack, Country, Male Vocal, Female Vocal, Instrumental, Orchestral, Oldies, Rockabilly, Surf, 12" Dance / Electronic, Rap, Exotica, Spoken Word, Comedy, Kids Stuff, Picture Discs... I'm drawing a blank any further than that... Might have a few more sections around haha.

Good thread ...

I really think it's an especially complex thing for someone like me who makes instrumental music in really a variety of genres that technically all are "electronic music" (at most I add a real guitar in but otherwise it's all synths/samples played by a keyboard) but rarely are tracks with a beat meant for dancing to.
 
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?" haha. It's a problem made all the more worse because I live in Las Vegas haha. "Do you spin your mixes at one of the casinos?" No actually i try to make really beautiful music with big lush arrangements that you can just close your eyes and drift away to from the comfort of your couch... No dancing or cover charge involved :-) 

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.