sort by genre

[brundogg]

I am very new to this site, so I don't know if this has been mentioned before. It would be cool if we could see the best albums by genre. You could see the best overall albums in classic rock, hip-hop, etc.

[albummaster]

It's a good idea and something we've been thinking of doing for a long time. However, the main issue is that many bands span multiple genres (and often there are even multiple genres within the same album) making it exceptionally difficult to implement.

albummaster

[albummaster]

We're just investigating the possibility of adding some sort of genre classification system (for a future site update) so that you can see the best rap, country, rock, folk albums etc.

Does anybody know of any data-souces that could be used as an 'official' genre classification for each album on this site? e.g. is The Beatles - Revolver rock, pop or something else? What about Trout Mask Replica? Who is the authority that decides?

This feature might open up a can of worms, but it's something a lot of people have asked for.

albummaster

[Elston]

Rate Your Music is an excellent source, see Trout Mask Replica, Revolver and Velvet Underground & Nico. It's by far the best resource I'm aware of for genre categorizing, though I have by no means explored every alternative.

[RFNAPLES]

Often an album has mixed genres. Of course there is the difficulty of defining genre, styles, subgenres, etc. Allmusic.com has done a pretty good job of genre selection.
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Top 100 Greatest Music Albums by RFNAPLES
Bubbling Under The Top 100 Greatest Mus...y RFNAPLES

[Elston]

I couldn't wrap my head around the fact that Trout Mask Replica was considered "pop/rock" on allmusic. After that discovery I ceased to explore the site.

[albummaster]

Obviously, we don't want to put people off visiting this site by getting the classifications wrong!

RYM have done a good job, but obviously we can't just copy their data. MusicBrainz is an open-source data repository but they don't seem to capture genre data. A tag system like Last.fm's is a bit 'noisy' to use as well (I don't think it will lend itself well to this scenario). Wikipedia is a bit of a free-for-all (there is too little control of who can edit). We'll keep this functionality on the back-burner until we find something that'll work well...

albummaster

[RFNAPLES]

Allmusic says Trout Mask Replica’s genre is pop/rock but lists its styles as:
Experimental Rock
Prog-Rock/ Art Rock
Experimental
Proto-Punk
Psychedelic
Blues-Rock

Perhaps you prefer calling styles genres. Nevertheless you still have the copyright issue.
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Top 100 Greatest Music Albums by RFNAPLES
Bubbling Under The Top 100 Greatest Mus...y RFNAPLES

[joannajewsom]

I'm all for this idea. As someone who has extensively used allmusic and rym, rym is much more reliable when it comes to genre. TMR is one of many examples (and I can point to some worse examples) where allmusic categorizes too broadly to an unhelpful degree.

Maybe we could have a system similar to RYM. We can start off with the main, broad classifications: rock, jazz, pop, hip-hop, country. From there users could propose new (sub)genres (trip-hop, ambient, punk, etc.) along with descriptions, and vote on which genres (primary and secondary) should be assigned to an album. To prevent someone coming along and just labeling Led Zeppelin as rap, a certain number of votes would be needed before a genre is assigned. Rather than copy their data, we can start from scratch and use a similar system, right?

[albummaster]

Yes, I think that's probably the way forward for this idea. We just need to think of a good set of classifications that aren't too broad to be meaningless but not too focused either that too few albums are matched when generating a chart for a particular genre. We need to find a balance in-between.