Some genres defy categorization.

I’m currently working on a personal project: to rip and organize all of my music to make it easily accessible. Not only am I talking about “artist\album\track” format but also accurate tagging. At first I thought it was going to be the album art that would be the trouble but between Media Monkey, Tag & Rename and Songbird I’ve got a pretty smooth work flow down. No, it’s the simple “genre” tag that’s getting me down.

The problem is that genres, after existing for some time, become obsolete. I realized this when I finished giving everything currently ripped a basic genre. Other than a few tricky artists (I’m looking at you, Bowie) it was fairly simply. But looking at my collection afterward I saw something shocking: most of my music was in a very few number of genres. Mainly “pop” and “indie”. In fact, that’s the incredible majority of my collection right there. And the reason for that is these genres are no longer accurate descriptors for the music.

Pop is the most obvious. When “pop” was first used it wasn’t so much a genre as a market or even an industry. You had classical, jazz, maybe country and pop. Popular music. But then everything people talked about was pop so pop had to be subdivided. Today the genre “pop” is actually a sub-genre of the original pop which makes it all the more confusing. But pop was spun off into the sub-genre pop with the advent of “alternative” as a genre. It was originally an alternative to mainstream pop. So then there was pop\pop and pop\alternative. But in the 90s almost everything turned to pop\alternative. So then we end up with things like indie. Indie used to stand for independent and was used to describe unsigned bands. You could have indie\punk, indie\pop, indie\country, etc. But pretty soon that became inaccurate as well. Indie itself became a genre instead of a market description so pop\indie was born.

This means that indie\pop is a very different sounding genre than pop\indie. The first is an unsigned pop band while the latter is a signed (and most likely expensively produced) indie band. The difference becomes more pronounced the deeper the sub-genre is before it’s appropriated into standard pop. Take “emo” for instance. Originally emo would have mapped (pop or indie)\punk\hardcore\emo. That would be a band like anything from Glassjaw to At The Drive-In. That band sounds nothing like pop\emo which would be something more akin to Fall Out Boy or My Chemical Romance.

It looks like with a constantly shifting music system the only classification that will keep working is one based on context, hence the full lineage system of “genre\sub-genre\sub-sub-genre\etc…”. However, since I can’t work that into current ID3 tags I’m stuck. Now the question is how far to subdivide the single genre tag I’m given. And that I am still unsure of.

So how do you cut up your music collections, in terms of storage and classification?