General genre classification question?

[Dr.Gonzo]

Originally Posted by catpodder

I don't portend to be a musicologist or anything...I have the hardest time with rock:
Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry - rock & roll?
Beatles - classic pop?
Journey, Cheap Trick, etc. - ???
Led Zepplin, Jimi Hendrix - Hard rock?

I have Lynyrd Skynyrd as Southern rock.

What about John Hiatt or John Prine?

Elvis Presley I have designated as oldies, along with the Everly Brothers, Righteous Brothers, Four Tops, Sam Cooke, Etc. It includes a lot of genres but it is classified as what gets played on oldies radio.

Beatles I would probably have as Oldies or Psychadelic Rock depending on what era.

Journey, Cheap Trick - Classic Rock

John Hiatt I have as Country Blues alongside Delbert McClinton. John Prine I would classify as Traditional Folk or Progressive Country.

I have a few tricky ones myself, like where to put 'Badly Drawn Boy'

[Huskerz85]

I'm not one for sub-catergorizing things.......have got my 'Rock' broken down into 3 broad categories.....

Modern Rock would denote stuff like Nickelback, Hinder, Hoobastank etc.

Rock is a general category for my old/older stuff like Bon Jovi & Guns N Roses.....also encompasses classics like Led Zeppelin and Kansas

I use Alternative as sort of a general 'All-Other' classification........I prefer it this way because if someone were to go through it......they could splice it up so many different ways, it wouldn't be funny.........(AFI, Coheed & Cambria, Something Corporate, Good Charlotte, Linkin Park, Story of the Year, Change of Pace are just some of what I would call 'Alternative' artists)


My Genres as a whole run like this though
Alternative
Comedy
Country
Disco
Easy Listening
Electronica & Dance
Funk
Latin
Modern Rock
Pop
R&B
Rap & Hip Hop
Reggae
Rock
Soundtrack
80's

[bob13]

All right, the genre tab in iTunes is a neverending source of befuddlement.

I'm looking at everyone's categories and no matter what you choose, some bands are just not going to fit.

Using Huskerz list, for example, where do you put the Scissor Sisters? They say they're Disco, but most people call them Dance since they're not from the '70s.

Big Audio Dynamite - Reggae or Pop or Rock? (Or The Police for that matter...)

The Aquabats - Punk? Pop? Reggae?

Kyuss? Hayseed Dixie? The new Wynton Marsalis & Willie Nelson CD? Elbow? Calexico? Sigur Ros? Ween?!?

I only mention this because I just noticed that four Belle & Sebastian albums I imported from the CDs all have different genres, and that's from the CD info itself. (Rock, Pop, Alternative, and Other, if you're interested.)

I'm not going to get a definitive answer we could just allow the All Music Guide (AMG calls Lucinda Williams Folk, and Lyle Lovett and The Jayhawks Rock) to tell us, but that has its own problems. (Oh, and every band I mentioned other than Willie & Wynton is "Rock" in the AMG.)

Anyway, I'm just venting after moving all my music to one big hard drive. 350GB is all my CDs -- now it's time to start ripping the vinyl...

[RabbinsDuck]

I used to have 100s of genres and am now busy paring them down to a couple dozen -- so much easier that way. I can't believe iTunes still does not have at least one 'sub-genre' field yet -- so use the comments field for that.

Pop
Alternative
Punk
Rock
Soft Rock
Classic Rock
Hard Rock
Heavy Metal
Rap
Hip-Hop
Oldies
Easy Listening
Soul
R & B
Reggae
Ska
Ska/Punk
Classical
Blues
Bluegrass
Jazz
Comedy
Books & Spoken Word
Gospel
Country
Electronic
Dance
Folk
New Age
World
Latin

That's what I am trying to get everything down to....
Thoughts?

[ilive]

Originally Posted by Cdammen

www.allmusic.com and explore music by genre (in the left menu). Then when you enter an artist mainpage you can see with genre/style/mood he is labeled under, and if you click one you get info about it. Pretty simple, eyh?

yes, it's simple, thanks for your info.

[impala096]

I know it's an older thread, but i think Rabbins Duck has the right idea about keeping the list of genres down as much as possible. I made the move to mediamonkey and one of the major reasons is that they do have subgenre support. Here's a screenshot of how i sort through my music on Mediamonkey:



As you can see i store the main genre under the 'grouping' field and then all the subgenres under the 'genre' field. I keep my main list of genres to only 15 and even though i have over 25,000 tracks it is easy to navigate through because for each main genres, i'll have 5-10 sub genres.

[dantedakilla]

Lol. Title says GENERAL genre classification. But the topic's about Rock. xD

I don't listen to a lot of rock, so I wouldn't know. I do listen to a CRAP load of EDM (Electronic Dance Music). I could just say Dance, but that's already a genre within the 'Electronic' genre. So... Would be alright if I brought in a topic about the EDM scene?

[Zozam]

I think it depends onyour own opinion. However if you want to really specific then try and put it in their genre lol

[Doherty]

Genre's suck... can really be a head wrecker.... I mean what exactly do you call Leonard Cohen's music? Tom Waits? part Jazz/Part Weimar Brechtian thingy/Part Beefheart..... I have a lot of world music, but I'm from Ireland and we call Irish music, 'Traditional', but in the context of your music library, Flamenco is traditional as much as Jigs and Reels, so I just call it all 'world', perhaps that is the only genre 'World'.... kind of like Louis Armstrong's "Man, all music is folk music. You ain't never heard no horse sing a song, have you?"