It’s not that we deal best with that many chunks of information, just that that’s about as much as we can concentrate on at any given time.
I agree. To me genres don’t seem to be useful. I’d tend to group individual songs according to mood & speed. Happy, sad, angry, etc. and slow, medium fast and so on.
If I wanted to rock out to some angry fast industrial techno I couldn’t necessarily include everything by Front 242, even if industrial techno was the general genre I’d assigned to them. They’ve got some stuff that is very slow & hypnotic, which would be a buzz kill in the middle of a playlist of angry fast “exercise” music.
It’s just easier for me to take a metal song, an industrial song, a techno song, and a punk song & stick them all under “fast angry,” as they all sound good together & fit the mood I’m going for.
Oh dear, this post really is going to confirm my geekiness for any remaining doubters.
re. Mood and Speed: When I first got iTunes I was planning on using the comments facility to do that, by having a mellow-angry 5 point scale and a slow-fast 5 point scale.
I abandoned the idea pretty quickly when I realised how long it would take to do that for 5000+ tracks, and stuck with the genres. I do have myriad other uses for the Comments facility:
[ul]
[li]Album tracks and B-sides generally have ‘AlbumTrack’ or ‘B-side’ in comments.[/li][li]Tracks that need censoring because they are “close to the bone”, because they are sexually explicit or contain swearing etc. have ‘classes’ e.g. ‘ClassB’, ‘ClassC’.[/li][li]Tracks that may be rendered inappropriate by certain types of news events have ‘news’ comments (e.g. ‘NewsAir’ for ‘Learn To Fly’)[/li][li]Tracks that certain people particularly like have their names in the comments.[/li][li]Tracks that are particularly cringeworthy have ‘Embo’ as a comment.[/li][li]Tracks that are poor recordings or are 96kbp or 64kbp mp3s have ‘Low Quality’.[/li][li]Eurovision songs have ‘Eurovision’, and finally Christmas songs have ‘Xmas’.[/li][/ul]
The most apparent difference between your genres and my own is that you have far more! Nonetheless, I went through your Genre classifications one by one, and found them to be most similar to my own from the mid-seventies through early nineties (although our descriptors are often dissimilar, the intention is clearly the same). That said, you do seem to have had an easier time splitting up eighties pop – I settled for ‘New Romantic’ (poppier, dancier), ‘New Wave’ (darker) and ‘Synth Pop’ (post 1985).
Anyway, the main difference lies where you have created far more genres for the nineties artists I generally lump together as ‘Alternative Rock’, ‘Alternative Pop’ or ‘Pop’. Likewise, I have more diversity down the other end, around the sixties. My ‘Rock & Roll’, ‘Progressive Rock’, ‘Psychedelic’, ‘Psychedelic Rock’ and ‘Surf Rock’ categories stand out. I also assume you don’t listen to Classical music, since I have three genres for this purpose: ‘Keyboard’, ‘Orchestral’ and ‘Opera’ (I gave up separating by time period, since the majority of my classical is of the 19th century ‘Romantic’ style).
Clearly this varied diversity is a function of what we listen to. I separate more by what I want to end up playing together: Would I want ELO popping up alongside Led Zeppelin? I see this as an extremely subjective exercise, so I won’t offer any advice - if it works for you, it’s fine. However, it was interesting to see how someone else approached this difficult task, so thanks for posting!
As you’ve possibly guessed: a) I don’t have any classical music in my iTunes (well, apart from an orchestral version of our national anthem that was on a footie compilation CD) and b) I’ve got far more post-1990 music than pre-1990 music. This influences my genre classification quite significantly.
Eighties: ‘Eighties Electropop’ is my genre that lumps together ‘New Romantic’ and ‘Synth Pop’ (how do you tell the difference without watching the videos?)
E.L.O is an interesting example of one aspect of my genre system. I have 5 E.L.O tracks–each assigned to a different genre: ‘Seventies’, ‘Seventies Pop’, ‘Eighties Rock’, ‘Soft Rock’ and finally ‘New Wave’. On the other hand I only have 1 Led Zeppelin track in there (you can probably guess which one).