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Topic: Categorizing music by genre (Read 3303 times) previous topic - next topic
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Categorizing music by genre

Hello,
I ripped my CDs to FLAC and I had to fill out the genre for each album.

I went with genres like "Pop", "Pop Rock", "Dance-Pop", "Synthpop", "New Wave", "Hard Rock", and so on. This categorization works but I consider it detailed and the more detailed the more confusion it may cause down the road. For example, now I'm at the stage of thinking if a certain album is "Progressive Rock", "Soft Rock" or "Southern Rock", you get the idea..

I noticed the allmusic.com website uses an approach where they put everything Pop (Pop Rock, Dance-Pop, Synthpop, ...) and Rock ( Hard Rock, Soft Rock, Southern Rock) under a genre called Pop/Rock. This is less precise but considering that categorization can be hell and we shouldn't rely on genres for finding our music, the allmusic approach is quite simple.

I was thinking in re-tagging all my albums, now I'm only at 100 CDs and it is not too late. I would rather go with something more general like the allmusic website, and beside Pop/Rock only create separate categories for "Country", "New Age", "Blues", "Christmas Music"..

What do you think about it? I would like to hear your opinions, and if all Pop and all Rock can go together, those two are probably the most in number of albums.

Thank you.

Re: Categorizing music by genre

Reply #1 –
Genre is a nightmare. If all you have is "pop" music, then you don't need that phrase at all. And others have no idea what might be differences between "Death doom metal" and "Funeral doom metal". And if you get albums from various sources, like artists themselves, you might get a lot of junk; some tend to use multiple tags because they likely search for genres themselves, and hope others who do the same will find them often; others seem to use elaborate constructions to make themselves look like a genre of their own.

As for hints:  In old days, I used https://www.foobar2000.org/components/view/foo_discogs quite a lot. Although Discogs Has A Stupid Policy Of Capitalizing Every Damn Word In Track Titles Even In Languages When That Is Plain Wrong, I got a lot of STYLE taggings that you might want to use.

MusicBrainz Picard does ... well, I just tried one Accept album to see what has changed ... some songs are "Heavy Metal", most songs are "Heavy Metal; Pop Rock; Rock". Whether you are comfortable with that ... again, if everything you have in your collection fits pop as an umbrella genre encompassing rock, hip hop, whatever, then you might just think that sure it doesn't cause any harm, you're never gonna search for it anyway.

Re: Categorizing music by genre

Reply #2 –
There is no one-size-fits-all taxonomy for music, and you'll likely err between two problematic opposites (too many sub-genres with arbitrary limits, vs. too few broad genres that are poorly evocative). Some genres raise issues per se, too; see the wikipedia page on "world music" for an interesting discussion of the matter!

It also depends on the peculiarities of your existing library, and thus on your personal tastes (e.g. if you have only a dozen albums of "classical music", no need for refinements such as "early music" "medieval" "baroque" "romantic" "XXth c." etc.). Although these can evolve too, and so would your classification needs.

My very personal "good enough" scheme:
Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Re: Categorizing music by genre

Reply #3 –
Most of my music is pop and rock. I do not collect various artists but I do collect compilation albums, but those compilations are from the same artist, like "Eagles - Best of". If I were to collect various artist I would put them all in the genre "Various Artists."
By pop I mean Madonna, Laura Branigan and by rock I mean Aerosmith, Van Halen, etc.. These two genres I think span most of the subgenres. If I have one tag to cover both it would be easier. I just don't know how to name that one tag. As I mentined earlier the allmusic website seems to use Pop/Rock (with the slash). I personally don't like having a slash but I think in the metadata that's not an issue only on the filesystem in file names, the / is problematic on Linux systems because it denotes a path.

Re: Categorizing music by genre

Reply #4 –
Quote from: Shot2 on
There is no one-size-fits-all taxonomy for music, and you'll likely err between two problematic opposites (too many sub-genres with arbitrary limits, vs. too few broad genres that are poorly evocative). Some genres raise issues per se, too; see the wikipedia page on "world music" for an interesting discussion of the matter!

It also depends on the peculiarities of your existing library, and thus on your personal tastes (e.g. if you have only a dozen albums of "classical music", no need for refinements such as "early music" "medieval" "baroque" "romantic" "XXth c." etc.). Although these can evolve too, and so would your classification needs.

My very personal "good enough" scheme:
Spoiler (click to show/hide)


Do you have that dash in the name of your genres "Pop-Rock" or you just used it on the forum?
Do you put hard rock bands in "Pop-Rock" as well. Right?

Re: Categorizing music by genre

Reply #5 –
Quote from: Porcus on
Genre is a nightmare.

This. Either follow Porcus' advice and live with what external taggers and artists throw at you, or: develop your very own taxonomy. I have both experimented with hierarchical (10 broad genres à la allmusic [Classical, Pop, Rock, ...] + 60-70 fine style tags, most of them just more granular genres [Vocal Pop, Hard Rock, Opera] but also special notifiers [Instrumental, Orchestral, Vocal] that span genres) and broad taxonomies. The hierarchical model was reasonable to maintain, as I only hand-sanitized the 10 broad categories, whereas the style taxonomy could grow a little untidy at times. All in all the cost-benefit ratio of maintaining such a tree did not cut it.

My current iteration on the genre tag aims to allow for directory browsing and consists of over 60 handcrafted genres that fit my library, so that each folder has <100 albums in each. I manually clustered similar albums and only then determined the label. Finally I tagged all files according to those clusters.

To give you an idea what those labels look for me (containing between 2 and 60 albums each): 
Acid Jazz       Dubstep          Indie Rock               Progressive Rock
Alternative RockEasy Listening   Industrial               Punk           
Ambiance        Electro          Instrumental ExperimentalR&B            
Ambient         Electro Acoustic Instrumental Hip Hop     Rap            
Big Beat        Euro House       Instrumental Rock        Reggae         
Blues           Exotic           Jazz                     Rock           
Chanson         Folk             Metal                    Ska            
Chiptune        Folk Metal       Metalcore                Soul           
Cinematic       Funk             Minimal Techno           Swing          
Classic Rock    Garage Rock      Mix                      Symphonic Metal
Classical       Glitch           Modern Classical         Synthpop       
Country         Glockenspiel     Nu Metal                 Synthwave      
Dance           Hard Rock        Pop                      Tech House     
Darkwave        Hip Hop          Pop Rock                 Techno         
Disco           House            Post Hardcore            Traditional    
Downtempo       IDM              Post Pop                 Trance         
Drum'n Bass     Indie Acoustic   Post Rock                Trip Hop       
Dub             Indie Pop        Progressive Metal        Vocal Pop      
With that, the file name pattern
Code: [Select]
genre/album artist - album [year]/d.nn. title.ext
becomes pretty browsable, even when I have only file system access.

Re: Categorizing music by genre

Reply #6 –
I could live with the genre completely removed from my FLAC files. I don't care about it as I never search by genre, however the music ripping software ask for one genre at least. I'm using Linux.

If I can put all pop and rock albums under pop/rock I think I covered like 80% of my library. These are the broad genres of allmusic https://www.allmusic.com/genres I was wondering if I can use the same few genres as it saves from a lot of headaches.

Re: Categorizing music by genre

Reply #7 –
Yes, Pop/Rock seems to be the catchall genre. I found a book on Google mentioning the same.



I'll go with that, it's much easier for me to just put bands like Pink Floyd, Queen, Van Halen, Madonna, and all these together. I really don't have the time and energy to think what Rock or what Pop are they and it doesn't worth it. I will only create separate genres for music like R&B, Country, New Age, or Christmas.

Pop and Rock are two of trickiest genres, some pop music has rock elements in it, some don't.  I think that's why the allmusic website uses a similar approach putting the two together, or Spotify even dropping all the genre thing and don't even showing them up. I will rely on the artist name for searching for music. I don't really collect compilations.
 

Re: Categorizing music by genre

Reply #8 –
Quote from: zoliky on
Do you have that dash in the name of your genres "Pop-Rock" or you just used it on the forum?
Do you put hard rock bands in "Pop-Rock" as well. Right?

I use the dash in the tag, yes; could use a slash but when (automatically) sorting the music into folders (with Foobar) it gets converted to a dash anyway.
Yes, it is a catch-all category for anything pop- or rock-like or -related (e.g. what some others consider "disco", "progressive" or other subtle distinctions, whatever they mean by that). As I'm no huge "rock" fan (even though I'm a geologist) that's enough for my needs.

Re: Categorizing music by genre

Reply #9 –
There is a sub-genre called "Pop Rock" for music like Bryan Adams or Huey Lewis and the News. These bands cannot be classified into Hard Rock but I think "Pop Rock" fits them well.  The sub-genre "Pop Rock" can derive from both "Pop" or "Rock" according to the RYM website: https://rateyourmusic.com/genres
so if I want to go with more generic genres and have only  two main genres like "Pop" and "Rock" in which one I put the "Pop Rock" music is probably up to me. I would probably put the Pop Rock albums in "Rock."
I think plain pop is more like Debbie Gibbson, Madonna, or Michael Jackson but I may be wrong.

Rock: Bryan Adams, Huey Lewis and the News, Kim Carnes, etc..
Pop: Debbie Gibbson, Martika, Wilson Phillips, Madonna, etc..

This website is interesting too https://www.blisshq.com/music-library-management-blog/2011/01/25/fundamental-music-genre-list/

Re: Categorizing music by genre

Reply #10 –
Quote from: zoliky on
I could live with the genre completely removed from my FLAC files. I don't care about it as I never search by genre, however the music ripping software ask for one genre at least. I'm using Linux.

I agree completely with it, in the past I spent too much time on tagging/re-tagging the genres and was never satisfied. In the end I was done with it and cleared the genre tag for my entire digital music collection of ~34.000 files and never looked back.

Re: Categorizing music by genre

Reply #11 –
Quote from: zoliky on
There is a sub-genre called "Pop Rock" for music like Bryan Adams or Huey Lewis and the News. These bands cannot be classified into Hard Rock but I think "Pop Rock" fits them well.

This topic is very interesting, the subject here is complex for me too.

In leaner discographies it is not very difficult to categorize the albums and their respective bands, but in immense discographies the challenge is present because of a more orderly organization that ends up proving necessary.

Just taking the example from the excerpt I extracted above, over the years I found that "Pop Rock" became a nomenclature that encompassed many bands that did not necessarily share the same feeling. That's when I created for myself a differentiation that has proved to be very effective so far and against which I no longer see the need to promote changes: I differentiated "Pop Rock" from "Rock Pop".

For me, Bryan Adams is "Rock Pop" and Huey Lewis and the News is "Pop Rock".

My criteria is based on subjective motives, but if I tried to describe them, I would try to say that, within the generic "Pop Rock" style, if the Artist/Album sounds more like Rock (more guitar elements) then it is "Rock Pop" and if it sounds more like Pop (more keyboard elements) then it would be "Pop Rock".

I categorize "Progressive Rock" when the Artist/Album doesn't fit into either "Rock Pop" or "Hard Rock", that is, it has very pronounced elements of guitars (and keyboards), but they wouldn't coexist well with AC/DC, Def Leppard, Poison and Quiet Riot, for example.

This differentiation has worked very well for me.

Re: Categorizing music by genre

Reply #12 –
I would like to adopt a fundamental music genre classification by which I mean to have a "Pop" genre for everything Pop (Pop, Dance-Pop, Teen Pop, Sophisti-pop, Soul Pop, Art Pop, Synthpop, etc...) so I can put all those in one single Pop genre.

I would like to do something similar with Rock. A main "Rock" genre to include everything rock maybe excluding just metal (Hard Rock, Progressive Rock, Classic Rock, Melodic Rock, etc..).

That would probably save me from a lot of headaches down the road in terms of clasification. On thing I noticed is that the allmusic website goes even simpler putting both genres under one catchall "Pop/Rock" genre. That would make things even simpler I think.

https://www.allmusic.com/genres

Not sure which one of these two to go with.

Re: Categorizing music by genre

Reply #13 –
AllMusic bundles "Pop/Rock" styles like "Dance" and "Hard Rock". This criterion is definitely not for me.

I usually create directories on my hard drive that contain the same names of the musical genres that cover the artists identified there. This facilitates my searches remarkably quickly.

Re: Categorizing music by genre

Reply #14 –
Yes. I was thinking in going with two categories. Pop and Rock. That will cover about 80% of my music collection.  The only thing I won't do is going into sub-genres like Dance-Pop. Dance-Pop will go into Pop and that's it. As long as I don't rely on genres for searching I think it will do it.
I do not use genre names in the directory structure but I have it defined in the FLAC metadata.

Re: Categorizing music by genre

Reply #15 –
A good organization in the directory hierarchy helps me to find what I'm looking for more quickly, but so far I haven't found a better ranking formula than the one through the name of the musical genre. Ranking by artist name would make the File Explorer scroll bar so small that 1mm of scroll could represent scrolling by hundreds of artists.

Hierarchizing by the musical genre led me to make many decisions of an eminently subjective nature that, if debated at an objective level, I would never reach a consensus with myself and the organization would become hell.

From this directory structure I started to tag my files. So my files actually mirror the way I've structured my collection on the hard drive.

Unfortunately, I haven't found a better formula than this one, so I ended up sticking with it, which in some ways has served me reasonably well.

Re: Categorizing music by genre

Reply #16 –
I agree with some here that division into genres is something quite personal and most of the time will not agree with what others would do. I rarely use the genre differentiation to walk my collection, but for those times I want to, I have only a few broad genres: Classical - Electronic - Jazz - Metal - Pop - Rock - Soundtrack. Classical is to me an obvious misnomer, but 'orchestral' doesn't fit either as there is chamber music in it as well, and as most people use this misnomer anyway, I do too.

Quote from: Adil on
A good organization in the directory hierarchy helps me to find what I'm looking for more quickly
Currently, I organize music by first character of artist name as the first directory layer, followed by the artist - album combination as the second layer and in case of a album with multiple disc, discnumber as the third layer. But then again, this is like genre, very much a personal preference
Music: sounds arranged such that they construct feelings.