Genres in your MP3 collection

Cafe Society
1

When you load music into your collection (whether you rip CDs, buy online, download from sites like iRate, or whatever), do you leave the genre selection as it is, or do you change it?

I usually disagree with the genre selection that pops up, usually coming from iTunes. Sometimes it’s not specific enough (Celtic folk, Zydeco, and steel drum all come up as “World”), and sometimes I think it’s just plain wrong. My family members all handle this differently:

I set all the genres on a song-by-song basis based on my own feelings about the song.If I’d listen to a particular song when I’m in a classical mood, then I call it classical. I often assign different genres to songs by the same artist off the same album, which drives my son nuts.

My wife has just a few genres set on iTunes, and she reclassifies everything to fit them.

My son assigns genre by band or artist. If he considers Eric Clapton to be rock, then all Eric Clapton is rock, even the stuff I’d call pure blues.

My daughter selects what to listen to by band, not genre, so she doesn’t even have the column visible on her iTunes screen.

My son-in-law pretty much ignores genres. Almost everything on his system is “Alternative & Punk” and he doesn’t use genre-based selection.

How do you handle it?

2

I’ve got:

Metal
Punk and Hardcore
Groove
Rap and Hip Hop
Assorted
Comedy

Pretty much everything fits into one of those for me.

3

Some of my Tom Waits mp3s are labeled “Unclassifiable”. Heh. I’m not totally sure how they got that way, but I know I didn’t do it.

4

I don’t sort by genre. Mostly. I don’t use the genre tags in the mp3s to do it. I couldn’t tell you how most of my music is classified by the mp3 genre tags.

To the extent I do do it, it’s very broad - all sound tracks and cast recordings are sorted together, all Japanese music is sorted together (with video game soundtracks as a sub-folder of that), so when an artist starts straddling genres, they can’t really jump out of the genre sorting.

I sort by artist or album (for Various Atists collections, and within the soundtrack/cast recordings), beyond that.

5

I use Windows Explorer rather than iTunes or other jukebox software, and my files are organized genre > artist > album. Like your son, I choose a genre for a particular artist so albums are easy to find.

As my larger categories I have:

Alternative
Asian
Classic Rock
Club
Comedy
Metal
Pop
Punk/Ska
Rap
Rock
Soft
Soundtracks
Swing

Some of these have seperate subcategories (such as Thrash, Progressive, etc., under Metal).

6

Some of my Beck mp3s are labeled “Beck-Like.” I didn’t do that. :cool:

7

I ignore the genres.

My playlists are:

Alternative
Beach Music
Blues & Jazz
Christmas
Classic Rock
Classical
Country
Folk
Irish
New Wave
Novelty
Punk & Industrial
Rock
Ska
Soundtracks
Spoken Word
Spy Tunes
Swing - New
Swing & Big Band
Vocalists
World Music & Reggae

8

I don’t like the genres that songs “come with”. Things like techotrancegroove don’t really tell me much about the songs, and I’d guess about 1/3rd of them aren’t even labeled correctly to begin with. Not to mention that listening to 900 alternative songs doesn’t narrow things down much. So I decided to make my own, since you can type in anything into the genre boxes, based on specific themes.

Current themes with examples:
All In Your Head Hammering in My Head by Garbage, Head by Mark Lanegan Band
Blood Loss Bleeding by The Prom Kings, Blood Makes Noise by Suzanne Vega
Broken Broken by 12 Stones, As Day Breaks by Carmen Rizzo
Could It Be…Satan? The Devil You Know by Face To Face, This Quiet Hell by Jet By Day
Damn the Man Do You Know? by Killradio, Excuse Me Mister by Ben Harper
Death And Other Heavy Things Early Morning Phone Call by Zac Maloy, I’m Stretched On Your Grave by Sinéad O’Connor
Desperately Wanting Ache For You by Ben Lee, Boarderline by Mighty Joe Plum
Drugs, Alcohol, Nicotine and Rock N Roll Get Stoned by Hinder, Drink Me Away by Ben Kweller
Firearms Kids With Guns by The Gorillaz
Heavenly Heavenly Junkies by Kent, I Fought The Angels by The Delgados
Impending Asthma Attack Oxygen’s Gone by Die Trying, Breathe by Moist
Look Around* Job’s Eyes by Far, I See Sound by Moth*
Losing My Religion God Is A DJ by Faithless, Starlovers by Gus Gus
Open Flames Burning The Cow by Earlimart, Ashes by Socialburn
Paging Saint Anthony* Long Lost by Better Than Ezra*
Paint By Numbers 7/4 (Shoreline) by Broken Social Scene, Five Pirates by Audible
Precious Metals Silver Strings by Helium, California Gold by Dada
Pretty Things Strange & Beautiful by Aqualung
**Reluctant Sex ** Jump Right In by The Urge, No Sex by Limp Bizkit
So Haunted Your Ghost by Kristin Hersh & Micheal Stipe
Take A Picture Some Incriminating Photographs by The Faint
Worlds Within My World Is Empty Without You by The Afghan Whigs

9

Since most digital music files are dated poorly if at all, my genres combine decades and style: 60s Pop, 70s New Wave, 80s Alternative and so on. The only ones outside this mold are things like Stand-up Comedy, Audiobook, Christmas, and Outsider (things like Wesley Willis and the Shaggs). I’m planning to use TuneTags to add a bit more granularity.

10

Dude I was so just writing this exact OP. Existing genres are usually wrong; I’ve had to make up quite a few. Here are all my genres:
**
Alt Country
Alt Folk
Alt Funk
Alt Pop
Avant Jazz
Bachelor Pad
Blues
Books & Spoken
Chill
Classical
Country
Disco
Ecto
Eighties
Emo HipHop
Folk
Funk Metal
Gay Rock
Gospel
Hillbilly Goth
Hip Hop
Holiday
Industrial
Jazz Instrumental
Jazz Vocal
Metal
Pop
Prog Pop
Prog Rock
Punk Funk
R&B
Reggae
Rock
Soundtrack
Technopop
Tough Broad
Triphop
Twee Female
Unclassifiable
World Classical
World Funk
World Pop**

11

Off the top of my head I have:

Audio books
Alternative
Comedy
Punk
Folk
Symphony
Maritime
Celtic
Rock
Hard Rock
Classic Rock
Soft Rock
Ska
Rave
80’s
Children’s
Soundtrack
OST (Original Soundtrack, so anything composed specifically for that movie goes here)
Podcasts
Acoustic
Bardic
Country
Bluegrass
Classic Country
Fanmix
Gothic
Opera
Oldies
Showtunes
Dance
Meditative
Musical
Parodies
Irish Punk

I keep meaning to go through and fix them up again, I haven’t done that with any of the new stuff I’ve gotten.

12

sorting by genre is important for my ipod, because with 52GB of music of all sorts, it takes friggin forever to scroll through by band name, so I go to the genre menu first to cut the list down by 80%. To avoid confusion, I put each artist under ONE genre, even if they’ve changed their style over the years, using the style that best suits them.

I often defy traditional genre labels, prefering to use my own standards:

Adult Alternative - which could also be called the “guilty pleasure” genre…Lisa Loeb, Gin Blossoms, Suzanne Vega…basically VH1-ish alternative groups.
Alternative Metal - bands such as Nightwish, Evanescence, Disturbed, Linkin Park which are based around metal, but have something unique to them
Alternative Rock - my biggest genre with 41 artists (Cake, Les Claypool, The Pixies, They Might Be Giants, etc). Consists mostly of current rock bands (the oldest being REM, the founders of “alt rock”) not mainstream enough to be recognizable by the average soccer mom
Baroque - Bach, Handel, Vivaldi,et c - lots of harpsichord and organ
Blues Rock - Clapton, Hendrix, Allman Bros, Blues Traveller, George Thorogood, etc - doesn’t matter the age, since they all protray the same emotion
Broadway - Wicked, Ave Q, Tommy, Phantom, Little Shop of Horrors, Spamalot
Classic Rock - The Who, Pink Floyd, Styx, etc - the line between Rock and Classic Rock is determined by if the artist was bigger before or after I was born (1980)
Classical - Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn, Schubert, the beginnings of the full-sized orchestra
Comedy-Music - Weird Al, Arrogant Worms, The Four Postmen, etc. Note that artists only get placed here if their music is INTENTIONALLY comedic.
Comedy-Spoken - George Carlin, Mitch Hedburg, Steven Wright, etc
Contemporary - Holst, Stravinksy, Prokofiev, etc - 20th century non-soundtrack classical music
Contemporary Classical - Hooked on Classics, String Quartet Tributes, Canadian Brass, etc - modern classical ensemble albums
Folk - Johnny Cash, My Morning Jacket, Jewel - because I refuse to have a Country genre
Grunge - Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, etc - mostly bands from the early half of the 90s. It’s a big subculture of Alt Rock which I separated to keep the size down
Indie Rock - This is a tough genre to label for many people. I tend to include bands such as Neutral Milk Hotel, The Decemberists, Franz Ferdinard, Yo La Tengo, Mike Doughty, John Vanderslice, Travis Morrison apply. Many bands (White Stripes, Beck, TMBG, etc) which sometimes get the indie rock genre label, but to me sound just as produced as arena rock bands, are found elsewhere on my ipod, usually in alt rock. I can barely explain my reasoning either.
Industrial - Nine Inch Nails, Gravity Kills, Stabbing Westward. Basically, keyboard-driven alt metal.
Jazz - Louis Armstrong, Fats Domino…and Richard Cheese.
Metal - Iron Maiden, Metallica, Slayer, etc - traditional head-banger music
New Age - Enya, Enigma, John Tesh - keyboard-based easy listening music
New Wave - Devo, Duran Duran, Oingo Boingo, The Killers - cheezy 80s keyboard-driven music
Polka - Those Darn Accordions, Frankie Yankovic, etc - accordion-driven music
Punk - The Clash, The Offspring, Chumbawamba - 3 chord bands (I don’t let politics decide if somebody like Green Day counts - they may not ACT Punk, but they SOUND it)
Rap - Beastie Boys, Eminem, Matisyahu, NWA - since I’m not as into the genre to break down (or even recognize) the different types of rap (i’m not even sure the difference between rap and hiphop), they all go in here
Rock - Tom Petty, U2, Bruce Springsteen, Van Halen, etc - mainstream current rock bands
Romantic - Berlioz, Dvorak, Liszt, Tchaikovsky - classical music from the latter 1800’s, where big was better!
Soul - Stevie Wonder, Barry White, etc - R&B and easy listening, but not bluesy enough for the Blues Rock genre
Soundtrack - John Williams, Jerry Goldsmith, Alan Silvestri, etc - movie scores
Techno - Moby, Orbital, Underworld, etc - electronic-based dance music
Tribute - Beatallica, Double Black Album - basically cover bands and remixers/rehashers
Video Game - video game scores, remixes and live performances. I am proud to say that this is my second largest genre!

13

I think this thread shows that while genres may be a convenient way of organising your own music collection, other peoples genres are too subjective to be very useful. The examples in the previous post are perfectly sensible and useful to fusoya, I’m sure, but to me many of them are too specialised or not clearly distinct from other genres. I’ve never really understood what “alternative” is supposed to mean, for instance.

Personally, I hate genre-isation and when I’m feeling particularly crotchety about it I will go through my MP3 collection removing the damn things.

14

The dates don’t really mean anything to me. I don’t see a stylistic difference, for example, between 1970s Blue Öyster Cult and 1980s Blue Öyster Cult. When an artist makes a significant change (e.g., Bruce Springsteen going bluegrass), that doesn’t tie it with other music of the decade. I know a lot of people that group their music by decades, though.

Fascinating! What are some examples of those three categories? Is “fanmix” like mash-up? My current categories are:

Acoustic (with guitar and piano subcategories)
Alternative & Punk
Barbershop Quartet
Blues (with satire and R&B subcategories)
Bootleg Mash-up
Carribean
Celtic (with rock, punk, dance, Scottish folk, Irish folk, and bluegrass crossover subcategories)
Christmas (with a dozen subcategories-I mostly have this category so I can exclude it for 11 months)
Classical (I keep meaning to add subcategories here and haven’t yet)
Country (with bluegrass, southern, and western subcategories)
Folk
Gospel
Jazz (with folk, acoustic, fusion, and blues crossover categories)
Latin
New Age (with a rock subcategory)
Pop (with electronic, oldies, and German subcategories)
Rock (with a pile of subcategories, including hard, soft, punk, southern, classic, surf, and rockabilly)
Satire/Parody/Humor (with various subcategories, including polka for Weird Al)
Soundtrack
Swing (with revival, ragtime and big band subcategories)
Theme songs
and a big miscellaneous category I’m still working on (Asian rock, zydeco, ska…)

15

oh and before somebody says something, the reason Weird Al is in comedy and not polka is that with the exception of his very first album, most of his albums do not have accordion on more than a couple songs. Infact, his latest three albums ONLY have accordion on the single polka track. Interestingly, Al often uses accordion on live versions of songs that didn’t have it on the album (Rabbi, Horoscope, Leper, Spiderman are examples from his last tour)

16

I kind of went crazy with it over the last year. I listen to a lot of different types of music and I like to grab a bunch of similar sounding songs or groups all at once. The result is that I now have dozens of genres.

I generally genreize them at the artist/album level, usually influenced by what Allmusic.com has to say about them. For example 1980s Bon Jovi might be “Hair Metal” while his current stuff is just traditional “Rock”.

And it’s kind of a tree as well. For example, if “Alternative Rock” gets too big, I might break it up into several varients.
Off the top of my head:
ROCK:
Rock - Traditional rock like Clapton or Tom Petti
Soft Rock - Elton John, Billy Joel
Hard Rock - Stuff like AC/DC or Led Zeppelin that’s harder than regular rock but not quite metal
Hair Metal - A subset of Hard Rock consisting of 80s bands like Motley Crue and Poison
Heavy Metal - Metallica, Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath - pure metaAAAAAAAAAL!
Pyschadelic/Prog rock - Kind of a grab bag of bands like Rush, Yes, The Doors, Pink Floyd. I kind of want to split it into two genres but I can’t decide where the split is

Adult Alternative - Soft ass shit like Coldplay or Radiohead
Chick Rock - Same as above, but just girly stuff like Tori Amos or Sarah McLaghlan
Alternative Rock - Alt rock bands that don’t fall into a sub genre
Alternative Metal - Rap Metal bands like Korn, Rage Against the Machine, Linkin Park or not quite classic metal like White Zombie
Funk Metal - Funky bands like Red Hot Chille Peppers, 311
Grunge - 90s Seattle bands like Pearl Jam or Nirvana
Post Grunge - All the generic alt-rock Pearl Jam wannabe bands since the 90s like Creed, Nickleback or Bush
Jam Bands - Bands like Rusted Root, The Greatful Dead, Dave Mathews Band, Phish and O.A.R.
Industrial - Stabbing Westward, NIN
Indie Rock - Kind of a more modern variation of Alt Rock. Franz Ferdinand, White Stripes, The Strokes, The Killers.

Punk - Classic punk like The Clash or newer stuff like Green Day and Blink 182
Celtic Punk - Same as above but more…Irish. Dropkick Murphys, The Pogues. Mostly St Paddys day stuff.
Emo-Punk - Punk bands with long odd names and longer song titles that sing about getting beaten up by jocks. Panic! At the Disco or Fallout Boy.

Reggea - Bob Marley
RAP, HIP HOP & R&B
Rap&Hip Hop - Pretty much what it says. Anything that doesn’t fall into one of the other genres - Kayene West, etc
90s Rap&Hip Hop - old P Diddy, Busta Rhymes
Hardcore Rap - Hard mostly East Coast stuff like Wu Tang clan and friends but with a different sound from Gangsta Rap.
Gagsta Rap - West Coast, mostly 90s rap like NWA, Dre, Ice Cube, Snoop
Southern Rap - Current rap from the South like Ludicris, Outcast, Lil John
Old School - Classic acts like Run DMC
Pop Rap - Guys like MC Hammer or Young MC who aren’t fit to be included in any other genre
R&B - Smoother stuff for the ladies
DANCE & ELECTRONICA
Dance - Basic cheesy dance music - C&C Music Factory
Dancehall - Reggea inspired dance music - Sean Paul
Trance - Paul Oakenfold, DJ Sasha & John Digweed
House - What I like to call “gay sounding techno”
Electronica - Kind of a catch all for stuff that doesn’t belong anywhere else. Moby, remixes, etc

There’s some other stuff too like:
New Age - Enya
Sountrack - John Williams, Hans Zimmer, movie themes, etc

17

Styles are too hyphenated at this point not to reset genres. Specificity just plain makes it easier to sort and create playlists. For world music I try to list continent and country as well, although I haven’t really sorted that way yet. And yeah, I hate that whole albums of stylistically diverse stuff comes up set as “rock.” Worse yet is the genre “unclassifiable.” Ten years ago I would have accepted that, maybe. Today I think it speaks of a lack of exposure or imagination.

18

I should probably explain some of my made up genres, as everyone else has.

I hate the label “alternative,” which has evolved from being vague, to meaningless, to outright self-contradictory: “alternative” is the mainstream anymore. Hence:
Alt Country Hank Williams III, Robbie Fulks, Neko Case, Jo Carol Pierce
Alt Folk Will Oldham/Palace/Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Daniel Johnston, Iron & Wine, Mountain Goats, Tom Waits
Alt Funk Dirty Beatniks, Four Tet, Groove Armada, Rinôçerôse
Alt Pop Clinic, The Coral, Dandy Warhols, Super Furry Animals
Most of the others are self-explanatory:
Avant Jazz Mary Margaret O’Hara, Scarnella, Nobukazu Takemura
Bachelor Pad Esquivel, Les Baxter, Walter Wanderley
Blues Canned Heat, RL Burnside
Books & Spoken Various books, Karen Finley
Chill Fridge, Nightmares on Wax, Nine Lazy 9
Classical Lots; obvious Jane’s Addiction, LCD Soundsystem
Country* Buck Owens, Hank Penny, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Roger Miller, Willie Nelson*
Disco Sylvester
“Ecto” is music of a style defined by a music discussion group I used to be a part of. It’s generally complex, melodic female artists. Named after an album by Happy Rhodes:
Ecto Anna Domino, Bjork, Eddi Reader/Fairground Attraction, Golden Palominos, Happy Rhodes, Heather Duby, Kate Bush, Kirsty MacColl, Jane Siberry, Life Without Buildings, Lisa Germano, The Moon Lay Hidden Beneath a Cloud, Rosie Thomas, Sinead O’Connor, Syd Straw, Velvet Belly, Wendy Maharry (Other artists considered to be “Ecto,” but who I don’t like, are Tori Amos, Sarah Machlachlan, Enya)
Eighties* Adam Ant, Billy Idol, Blancmange, Thompson Twins*
Emo HipHop Atmosphere, Sage Francis, Sole
Folk Bob Dylan, Library of Congress Folk Recordings
Funk Metal Fishbone, Skunk Anansie
Gay Rock Antony and the Johnsons, Extra Fancy, Future Bible Heroes, Gothic Archies, Magnetic Fields, Rufus Wainwright, Sixths
Gospel The Soul Stirrers
Hillbilly Goth The Blacks, the Geraldine Fibbers, Jim White, Johnny Dowd, Pinetop Seven, Victoria Williams
Hip Hop Beastie Boys, Cee-Lo, Del tha Funky…, Outkast, etc. etc.
Hip Pop Citizen Cope, Definition of Sound, Gnarls Barkley, Gorillaz, Imani Coppola, Spearhead, etc.
Holiday obvious
Industrial Die Warzau, Foetus, MManson, NIN, Pig, Zombie
Jazz Instrumental obvious; lots
Jazz Vocal oh so many
Metal* Moistboyz*
Pop Bacharach, Carpenters, Crystals, Freddy Fender, Tom Jones
Prog Pop Church, Coldplay, Flaming Lips, Hector Zazou, Jeff Buckley, Queen, Radiohead, Sigur Ros, Spiritualized, Stump, This Mortal Coil
Prog Rock Can, King Crimson, Pink Floyd, Syd Barrett
Punk Funk Jane’s Addiction, LCD Soundsystem
R&B Jackson Five, Lauryn Hill, Marvin Gaye, Shuggie Otis
Soundtrack Grace of My Heart, One from the Heart, Umbrellas of Cherbourg
Technopop Daft Punk, Fischerspooner, Miss Kittin and the Hacker, Royksopp
Tough Broad Carla Bozulich, Cat Power, Danielle Dax, Diamanda Galas, Ethyl Meatplow, Grace Jones, Hole, Jane Jensen, Katell Keinig, L7, Loretta Lynn, Missy Elliot, Moe Tucker, PJ Harvey, Pretty Girls Make Graves, Rasputina, Ruby, Throwing Muses, Toya [Wilcox]
Triphop DJ Krush, Doctor L, Laika, Pigeonhed, Prefuse 73, Red Snapper, Rickie Lee Jones, Snake Farm, Vanessa Daou
Twee Female Anita Lane, Cardigans, Claudine Longet, Rose Murphy, Stina Nordenstam, Takaka Minekawa
Unclassifiable* Elsa Lanchester Sings Bawdy Cockney Songs, Rhythm and Noise, Ruth Wallis, Scott Walker, the Shaggs*
World Classical Csokolom, I Maestri Del Ballo Liscio
World Funk Aisha Kandisha’s Jarring Effects, Cibo Matto, Ini Kamoze, Jah Wobble, MIA, Monsoon, Rachid Taha, Vodu 155, West India Company, Wyclef Jean, Zuco 103
World Pop* Air (Japan), Caetano Veloso, Cafe Tacuba, Manu Chao, Negu Gorriak, Super Furry Animals, Zap Mama*

19

elfkin477, I like the way you think. I think I’ll do something similary to my iTunes collection.

Right now, I don’t even bother because trying to squeeze things like, right, Tom Waits into a single category makes my head hurt. But coming up with themes or moods for songs? That I could enjoy.

20

I used to pick and choose Genres per song, but I’ve got so much music that it gets set on an album basis if it gets set at all.

I remember when I started using MusicMatch Jukebox years ago to rip CDs, it had it’s own genre entry for Primus! Modern Rock, Opera, Primus, …lol.