My friend and I are in a friendly (for the most part) dispute over the genre category in iTunes (we’ll call my friend “E”)
E posits that the genre should be used for only very basic classifications (e.g. “Rock” “jazz” “electronic” etc). He thinks that labels like “indie” vs. “twee” vs. “hard rock” are useless b/c Yo La Tengo, Belle & Sebastian, and Led Zeppelin are fundamentally very similar (drums, vocals, bass, and rhythm guitar)
I think that a genre/sub-genre/sub-sub-genre formula would be better - e.g.:
The Shins: Rock/Power Pop
Boards of Canada: Electronic/Experimental
Radiohead: Rock/Experimental
Bob Dylan*: Rock/Folk
Loretta Lynn: Rock/Country/Nashville
I realize mine could confusing and is far more subjective.
Personally, I am consistently frustrated by the insistence of most music organization software that you cram that kind of categorization information into a single field. I’d much rather use a system whereby an arbitrary number of tags can be added to each track. Many songs can be described in a number of ways, and attempting to condense that description into one short “genre” string results in exactly the problem you mention. You can encompass it all and be uselessly vague, or you can leave out information and be uselessly specific.
For example, should “Dandelions” by Five Iron Frenzy be listed under the “Christian” genre? Ska? Christian Ska? What if I want a category of “Religious” music?
Other songs can be even worse. Should “Bibelworte des Allmächtigen” by E Nomine be labeled Trance, Electronic, Monumental Dance, or Gregorian Chant? Tranceotronic Gregorian Dance-Chant? And none of those labels cover the German spoken vocals. And for that matter, it could go in the Religious category too. :smack:
In the end, I think the best solution is something like you suggest, but in a way that’s actually recognized by the media library software; i.e., instead of treating “Rock/Country/Nashville” as a single string, a song by Loretta Lynn could be considered to have the “Rock,” “Country,” and “Nashville” tags. This would be especially important in cases where, say, a song has two or more equally prominent genres or subgenres, so you wouldn’t run into a situation in which, for example, “Ska/Pop” is treated as a different genre from “Pop/Ska.”
Is it really useful to be so descriptive that you have 300 descriptions for 300 songs? Generally, I go with whatever label Gracenotes provides (unless it’s horribly off-base, like “alternative” for all the blues, gospel, soul, Cajun, etc. from the Oxford American compilations).
I’m not trying to archive posterity here, I want blues, classical and jazz at my fingertips for when that’s the kind of mood I’m in. Pick ten catchall categories and stick with 'em, or live down the inconvenience.
Well, it’s not really 300 descriptions for 300 songs. It’s maybe a dozen or two different “tags” applied in different combinations to 300 songs. The point is to make genre descriptions 1) more descriptive and 2) more searchable. Suppose I feel like queuing up all the symphonic metal in my library. If I’ve gone the over-general route and just tagged a thousand different songs as “metal” whether they’re power metal, speed metal, death metal, or what have you, I’m going to have to sift through the whole thing by hand and just pick out the bands that play primarily symphonic metal. This is annoying.
On the other hand, if I labeled them all specifically, I could easily extract the symphonic metal, but what if later I just wanted to queue up everything in the “metal” genre? Then I’d have to go through and queue up every category with the word “metal” in it. This is also annoying.
Now, this is somewhat ameliorated by the fact that most music management software allows you to search all the tag information in your library textually, so you could label songs “power metal,” “symphonic metal,” etc. and they would still come up in a search for “metal.” Unfortunately, so will any song with the word “metal” in its title. Maybe there are not so many of those, but if you tried to search for “Rock,” “Ska,” “Soul,” or other one-word genre names you will probably get a lot of unintended hits.
For example, just searching for “Soul” in my collection yields, among many others, The Bouncing Souls (definitely not a Soul group), “Soul Society” by Kamelot, “Ocean Soul” by Nightwish, “Souliko” by the Red Army Choir, and a whole bunch of video game soundtrack pieces composed by Jeremy Soule.
And that still doesn’t accommodate situations like I outlined above, where a song has many different categorizations that could be legitimately applied to it, and which aren’t necessarily textually related. Bottom line, I don’t see that there’s any use at all to trying to organize music by putting each song in one and only one genre. It would be like Google indexing each web page by one and only one keyword.
If I’m reading you correctly, in both the scenarios you describe you could (provided you have tagged them in the genre cat) create a live-updating smart playlist where “genre” contains “soul/southern soul” or “metal/symphonic metal” (or whatever).
That would cull out “soul/deep soul” and “soul/blue-eyed soul” as well as Soul Coughing and De La Soul.
that would be cool, it would be nice to have that be an opt-in function (“turn on advanced tagging”) on itunes as it wouldn’t appeal to 98% of users
I use the “Grouping” or “Comments” fields in iTunes to create tag strings separated by a “,”. You can then use the smart playlist feature to search for those tags. I generally tag songs by sound, content or mood, not genre though.
As an aside, I’m glad after like a dozen version over the years, iTunes now has embeded boolean operatives in its smart playlist feature ( Year BETWEEN 1990 AND 1999 AND ANY ( genre is …)) )
I generally apply genres by artist and album. Basically the whole purpose is to quickly find music that is stylistically similar without being so granular that every album is its own genre…
I currently have 75 distinct genres for about 8000 songs. The methodology is as follows. My musical tastes can be classified along several broad categories:
Rock
Alternative Rock (which includes 70s Punk Rock, and Indie Rock)…I may just call this Modern Rock but that might make people think of 80s pop rock.
Dance
Electronica
and several specific categories like Reggae, Soundtracks, Comedy, Jazz, Country of which I have a relative small and homogeneous collection of songs.
Since these categories are so broad as to encompass thousands of songs, they are not particularly useful. So within each category there are several genres. For example, “Rock” is classic, non alternative rock music primarily from the 80s and earlier but can also include current works by such artists. So the brekdown for all the Rock genres looks something like this:
Rock - Tom Petty, Meat Loaf
Hard Rock - Led Zeppelin
Heavy Metal - Iron Maiden, Dio
Soft Rock - Billy Joel, Joe Jackson
As these categories can get large, I sometimes break them down into subgenres The particular convention I use is to put the subgenre in [brackets]. That way they all sort together alphabetically under the same parent genre. So in my collection:
Rock - (mostly rock that doesn’t fall into a sub genre) Bruce Springsteen
Rock [Arena] - (70s and 80s guitar driven rock, but not quite Hard Rock) Kansas, Journey, Styx
Rock [Progressive] - Rush, Pink Floyd, Yes
Hard Rock (not quite Heavy Metal) - Led Zeppelin, Aerosmith
Hard Rock [Hair Metal] (specific bands from the 80s) - Poison, Whitesnake
Hard Rock [Southern] - Lynyrd Skynyrd, ZZ Top
Heavy Metal - Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, Metallica
Soft Rock (mostly 70s and 80s light rock music) - Elton John, Billy Joel
Soft Rock [Folk] (mostly 60s/70s light rock music) - Cat Stevens, Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan
Now it’s not a perfect system. Where is the line between Soft Rock, Rock, Hard Rock and Heavy Metal? While Rush, Floyd and Yes can all be considered Progressive Rock, are their styles really similar? And Heavy Metal has grown to a point where it may soon become appropriate to split it into Brittish Heavy Metal, Thrash, and so on.
I spend a lot of time creating and merging genres and shuffling albums around within them. But mostly all of this is for my convenience and my convenience alone. Ultimately the best test is if I just let a genre of songs play though, are there any songers where I’m like “what the hell is that doing in there?!”
Extensible Meta Tagging would be ideal. The system is used pervasively in the blogosphere and it works exceptionally well. It allows any level of granularity and customization without discarding more traditional themes. It would apply to music easily and it should be exceptionally easy to apply to music and to be retroactively applied to existing archives and databases.
If I can tag Metallica’s The Ecstasy of Gold from the S&M album with “Metal”, “Live”, “Orchestra”, “Remake”, “Cover”, “Heavy Metal”, “Hard Rock” and “Instrumental” as well as “Mellow”, “Running”, “Party” and “Ambiance” then I can pretty much customize just how specific I want to be in a search or auto-playlist. Frankly it would essentially deprecate the entire need for playlists at all since everything would just be “tagged”.
Using that method I could pull in that song generally as a “Metal” list, or specifically as a “Heavy Metal Instrumental from 1999”. I could also pull it by the type of mood it is associated with for me or what activities that I want to use it with.
Zune or iTunes or whatever could just assign some basic tags (“Heavy Metal” and “Live”) automatically in their system that is auto-populated and then instead of forcing me to overwrite their categorization I could simply augment it however I prefer.
I’m one of the broad-categories people, mainly because I’m lazy and don’t want to have to retag thousands and thousands of songs individually. So I simplify all the genres down to the basics (Rock, Jazz, Country, African) and if I want a playlist more specific than that I’ll make one. Because dragging and dropping is marginally less time-consuming than rewriting tags, I guess.
I’ll admit it makes me slightly happy when I stick a compilation CD into the computer and they’ve added the right year of a song’s release rather than the year the CD came out. An accurate year is another fine way for a lazy person to sort.
My categories are:
Beat - if I like the rhythms
Mellow - if it’s low key
Classical - the classical definition of classical
Neoclassical - modern music reminiscent of classical music
Crooners – for songs with great vocals
I have too much music to classify easily, although I’ve seen software that group sources the genre for you, but I haven’t tried it yet and can’t think of the name off hand. If I were to do it though, I’d do it one of two ways
with hash tags seperated by semicolons as such: #rock;#folkrock;#acoustic
heirarchical as such: rock>folk rock
I don’t think there’s a universally best answer. It would depend on what kind of smart playlists you want to make or alternatively how you want to use the genre sidebar.