2019-03-16, 17:12
I see this has turned into a philosophical musing about the usage of the "genre" tag. Maybe the relevant postings could be split into its own thread as the topic is generally interesting but not a case of support?
Personally, I think there is a lot of confusion about the usage of "genre" and "style". While some services think genre should consists only of only a handful of classifications and then be futher categorized through sub-classifications of style, personally I find this impracical. The basic idea has merita, but I would I would not like to tag 80% of my collection as "POP/ROCK". Instead, I apply such a classification in my head when sorting files into folders. I have my Classical, my Jazz, my Modern and my Soundtrack folder (also Japanese but that is another matter). When sorting by genre in my music software, I don't want to sort twice according to genre and again according to style, I just want to sort by genre which I use in a fine-grained way.
All of this shows, that it is and will forever be impossible to reach an accord in thinking and personal preference, unless the rulez would be passed as law or binding guidelines for the whole world, and all tagging services and music software would use those same rules. Until then, the best anyone can do is to give the user a sensible range of choices which are easy to achieve through an accessible GUI.
Personally, I think there is a lot of confusion about the usage of "genre" and "style". While some services think genre should consists only of only a handful of classifications and then be futher categorized through sub-classifications of style, personally I find this impracical. The basic idea has merita, but I would I would not like to tag 80% of my collection as "POP/ROCK". Instead, I apply such a classification in my head when sorting files into folders. I have my Classical, my Jazz, my Modern and my Soundtrack folder (also Japanese but that is another matter). When sorting by genre in my music software, I don't want to sort twice according to genre and again according to style, I just want to sort by genre which I use in a fine-grained way.
All of this shows, that it is and will forever be impossible to reach an accord in thinking and personal preference, unless the rulez would be passed as law or binding guidelines for the whole world, and all tagging services and music software would use those same rules. Until then, the best anyone can do is to give the user a sensible range of choices which are easy to achieve through an accessible GUI.
