Genres: have I missed anything?
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I have become a little bogged down in genre classification.
It’s a much written-about subject, with very little resolution – apart from that it’s impossible to set out a rigid format for music classification.
I decided to contact a series of organisations who deal with music classification, or at least deal with it as part of their field of expertise.
- Spotify (“Unfortunately everyone here at Spotify is working extremely hard to deliver the best service possible which means that we won’t be able to help with your request this time”)
- Gracenote Press – no reply
The British Library say this on their website
We do not categorise individual recordings by genre – there would be too many arguments and it would be too time-consuming (although some of our data from external sources is tagged by genre so there are some occurrences). You are likely to find some entries by using the genre as a search word in the subject field – this will bring up entries that others (record compilers, broadcasters) have decided fit into that particular category. If you are stuck for examples of a particular type of music you can contact us at the address below.
In the end I decided a crowdsourced project was in order – as long as the categories I decided upon, covered all the music sub-genres out there.
I created Google Docs image, and – by sending the link out via Twitter/Facebook, allowed people to add / remove / move genres of music.
The Aim was to hopefully draw attention to any discrepancies within genres – was I covering all bases? Were there any sub-genres which significantly crossed main genres?
There was a flurry of interest, and people were keen to add sub-categories, but not one person added or suggested a main category
- Had I nailed it and come up with a definitive mini-list of genres?
- Did I not make it clear that people COULD add categories?
It also became clear that there was a LOT of crossover between Urban and Dance.
I wondered: should I merge the 2 categories? I asked Twitter …
theaardvark theaardvark
theaardvark theaardvark
Is rock dead? Support blog 
Thought I’d post here to allow for a longer format.
I think you’re right, a definitive analysis of sub-genres that accurately allocates them to main genres would be impossible. Sub-genres by default take the main genre and cross-pollinate it with ideas from other genres and other “corruptions”.
However, for your “Is Rock Dead” visualisation, don’t think you need a completely accurate analysis of sub-genres. You simply need an approximation that doesn’t move too much over time so that you can track the relative rise and fall of those genres.
As a project, it’s always going to be subjective. Is Drum & Bass a Dance music or an Urban music? I’d say Urban, you have it in Dance. Is Jungle different? How about Dubstep? I’d put Dubstep in Dance even though it’s closely related to DnB.
It’s all fairly irrelevant. Once you’ve got a classification to work from, it’s the relative movements that are important for your end comparison.
Yo are right. I asked for the subcategories so I could see if I had missed anything, or if there was a particular sub-genre that was worthy of being promoted!
I really need to nail the classification at a base level for this to be worth anything and I worry that, as you say, there is way too much crossover for this to be useful – especially over time as genres change.
I have just had another thought – shift the focus away from genre, and towards what I consider to be a VITAL element of rock – the guitar.
So as I process the various albums in the charts, I ask – does a guitar feature? (at least heavily enough for it to be a feature, not a sample)
The rise and fall of the guitar in modern chart music. (more here http://bit.ly/gck7wS) – might be a goer.
if you could strong-arm a programming sort, gracenote has an API available for free to non-comercial uses —it’s beyond me, but probably easy enough for a code-monkey.