by snacks » Thu Feb 01, 2007 3:08 pm
Great thread. I've been battling the Genre thing for years - I've got over 100,000 songs in my library. What it comes down to, like many have said, is it's personal and basically for me, became a way to find similar artists that I wanted to listen to together. The only "real" solution I've come up with is just to have a bunch (way too many) Genres (I've got 95) and put other terms in other fields which I can call up with a search. Like I've got World Music broken down into 4 genres - World/Americas, World/Europe, World/Eastern & World/African Arab... Then I put more specific info: Brazil, Mexico, Singer Songwriter... into the Grouping field in Itunes - which MM does read even though it doesn't show up in any visible field (I can't figure that one out)
I can't even begin to imagine putting my songs into categories like mood, theme, style - it would kill me - although I would love to! I'd probably do it with Allmusic if there was a way to link.. which would be great, but using Allmusic for Genre doesn't seem very smart to me (personal observation), they've got Artists like Regina Spektor and Feist listed under Rock along with The Allman Brothers??? If you did this you'd have to have subgenres.
In the end it's so personal and subjective and just depends what you want to use genre for...
Just some random thoughts... by the way that Wikipedia list of Genres is Mind boggling!
Great thread. I've been battling the Genre thing for years - I've got over 100,000 songs in my library. What it comes down to, like many have said, is it's personal and basically for me, became a way to find similar artists that I wanted to listen to together. The only "real" solution I've come up with is just to have a bunch (way too many) Genres (I've got 95) and put other terms in other fields which I can call up with a search. Like I've got World Music broken down into 4 genres - World/Americas, World/Europe, World/Eastern & World/African Arab... Then I put more specific info: Brazil, Mexico, Singer Songwriter... into the Grouping field in Itunes - which MM does read even though it doesn't show up in any visible field (I can't figure that one out)
I can't even begin to imagine putting my songs into categories like mood, theme, style - it would kill me - although I would love to! I'd probably do it with Allmusic if there was a way to link.. which would be great, but using Allmusic for Genre doesn't seem very smart to me (personal observation), they've got Artists like Regina Spektor and Feist listed under Rock along with The Allman Brothers??? If you did this you'd have to have subgenres.
In the end it's so personal and subjective and just depends what you want to use genre for...
Just some random thoughts... by the way that Wikipedia list of Genres is Mind boggling!