Voting on Genres Through Charts - Suggestions

sp4cetiger

Skinny wrote:

I find myself in the strange position of agreeing with JMan. I don't actually spend much time thinking about genres, but it would be handy if we were able to filter albums in the database or individual charts by genre. I dunno, I'm all for it.

Pretty much this. I don't understand why people get so worked up about genres. It's just an occasionally useful way to categorize music, it doesn't hold any deep meaning or objective truth that allows others to pass judgement.

That said, I'm also cool with Romanelli's suggestion of using some official source for the genres, so as to bypass most of the bickering. People can still make their own personalized genre charts if they don't agree with what's in the database.

Skinny

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Puncture Repair wrote:

I think genres are important for a number of reasons. Firstly, when discovering music it makes life much easy to hone in on a sound that you fancy discovering more of, and then once in your music collection, it again makes it much more simple to shape what music you're listening to. I frequently use the genre tag in my music player to find an album to listen to when I'm unsure what I want to listen to next, but understand which genre which fit my mood best. But also I think genres are importantly contextually and historically, and I think it's great that by applying a music a tag, like a genre, it's placed into the wider picture of music and how the music around it has influenced it.

So, would it be nice to have a genre system on BEA? Absolutely. Is it worth the time and the effort to implement one? I really don't think so, a quick google search does all of the work for the user in an instance, and websites like Last.fm and RYM have very strong and established voting and tagging systems that produce some very accurate results. Maybe the system would save the user from a coupe extra clicks (which certainly add up), but I think it's best to focus on BEA's USP (creating charts) before gradually evolving it into a music database.

I really hate it when somebody disagrees with me whilst being totally reasonable and rational. I still think having genre tags or assigned genres here on BEA would be extremely beneficial, but I can't fault anything you've said here.
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Kiki

Have an option when creating a chart to assign a genre to it. Then when you click on 'THe Charts' between Statistics and 'Overall' one of the options in 'Customise View' is 'Select Genre' or 'Select Chart Genre' and you can find a few charts with those genres 😄

Sure you could simply go finding the genre charts yourself but I don't know what Patman, HigherthantheSun, Jman, Dividebyzero etc etc etc have in their custom charts. I will have to go through every user individually or wait for new posts on 'Chart Talk' thread. If you look at my custom charts they're a huge list of jumbled up lists, some half hearted and unfinished. Other users have even bigger lists. The idea above would give so much convince.

Sure someone could choose a blatantly different genre than the albums on there as a joke. The custom charts are only made by level 8's (am I correct?) so no one will consistently do it and it would only be funny the first time.

Last edited by Kiki on 09/06/2014 17:04; edited 1 time in total

Skinny

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Kiki wrote:

Sure someone could choose a blatantly different genre than the albums on their as a joke. The custom charts are only made by level 8's (am I correct?) so no one will consistently do it and it would only be funny the first time.

I'll put a fiver on Happymeal at evens.
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BrandonMiaow

Kiki wrote:

Have an option when creating a chart to assign a genre to it. Then when you click on 'THe Charts' between Statistics and 'Overall' one of the options in 'Customise View' is 'Select Genre' or 'Select Chart Genre' and you can find a few charts with those genres :)

I actually quite like this idea. It keeps the focus on charts while still implementing a way of sorting by genres. Maybe you could just use a tagging system for the charts in general? Though not too many tags, you know, there'd probably have to be a limit so someone doesn't type out a seemingly endless list of genres just to get their list to come up in a search.

mickilennial

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meccalecca wrote:

Ehh. seems like a waste of time and energy, which will ultimately lead to loads of ridiculous bickering about stupid sub sub sub genres. "Cocteau Twins are shoegaze. No, they're dream pop. No, you're both wrong, they're ethereal wave!"

Romanelli wrote:

This is just my opinion...but I do think that genre tagging would be the beginning of over complicating things around here. I think it would create a lot more work. And I think that people have, already at their disposal, enough ways to help them to put their music into categories. I'd be willing to bet that most of the people who would use this site already have enough of an idea of what genre an artist or album should reside in.

Data moderation has not been exactly flowing lately, either. Album tracks have just been caught up today after having been running at least 24 hours behind for some time. And the backlog in the artist moderations were just recently caught up from June. Do we really need to add yet another category to that?

Not to be a parrot, but this echoes my thought to a lesser extent. Last.fm which people keep citing is a mess; their tagging system is awful and is simply majority vote (whereas rateyourmusic has more nuances than "Im tagging Phil Collins as black metal lolololol!"). I don't want a genre system on this site and I find the history and development of genres interesting as all hell.

meccalecca

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Kiki wrote:

Have an option when creating a chart to assign a genre to it. Then when you click on 'THe Charts' between Statistics and 'Overall' one of the options in 'Customise View' is 'Select Genre' or 'Select Chart Genre' and you can find a few charts with those genres 😄

I quite like this idea as well.
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JMan

Kiki wrote:

Have an option when creating a chart to assign a genre to it. Then when you click on 'THe Charts' between Statistics and 'Overall' one of the options in 'Customise View' is 'Select Genre' or 'Select Chart Genre' and you can find a few charts with those genres :)

I like this idea, as well. But my concern in if users would want to see the top albums of the assigned genre decided by these genre charts.

albummaster

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I've been watching the thread develop to see which way it would go. The primary reason for wanting to include meta data about each release is to aid discovery. For example, if you are in a search engine and want to know the best jazz albums, currently BEA can't provide an answer to this except for checking out the charts that a given album appears in and hoping that similar albums might also appear in that chart. But without the descriptive information about the album's genre, you wouldn't know that other albums in the same chart were the same genre (except if you were already familiar with the artist/genre).

As others have said, the problem with assigning descriptive labels to any kind of music is that it will be extremely subjective, and different people will have different ideas of what genre an album should appear in, which is bound lead to argument & bickering. I think it's definitely more of a problem the deeper you go into a particular style. As mecca alluded to, you can go to infinite degrees with any genre & we will end up spending time unproductively on the most pointless debate about which sub-genre(s) an album should belong to & still people might not agree. Yes, we could borrow the data from a catalogue or license it (but not sure from where), but BEA'd then be reliant on an external source and still have the problem that people might not agree with the data, so I prefer the idea of BEA being in control of their own data in some way.

I also relate to what martinho said, there is something intangible about pigeon-holing albums which needs careful treatment:

martinho wrote:

we are going to vote for what genre the beatles help is?? this to me very strange urge to squeeze an album into just ONE genre and indeed by the use of the exclusional democratic system is just : WRONG... there are of course many albums out there that really belongs in a certain genre, but on the other hand there are just to many ones that has their octopus arms in multiple genres for us to chop 9 of them off just like that. be openminded about it. it's only music. it's only art.

The alternative idea (which would have less management overhead) would be to have a tagging system which would work a bit like Last.fm (and other sites) with the most popular tags being more prominent. This would allow people the flexibility to do what they like, but also has drawbacks in that the vocabulary of the tags can't be controlled and the tags could then be misused (e.g. with plain rubbish, spam, and derogatory terms). Neither solution is perfect which is probably the main reason nothing has been implemented yet.

A third option would not be to add any genre detail and instead rely on some kind of recommendation engine to provide suggestions based on which albums tend to appear together in the same charts etc, or a user recommendation system (discussed elsewhere), but I do think some kind of descriptive meta-data would be useful for people browsing the site & would add another dimension to BEA.

JMan

I like the tag idea more that mine. Not a lot of people here have custom charts. I recently search for alternative charts, and only two or three showed up (excluding my newly made one). We don't have enough users for custom charts, anyway.