Apologies for the delay in doing this but finally got the time to post here to open up (& continue) the debate about possible top-level genre categories on BEA. Spyglass suggested in another thread to create a candidate list that gets us a bit closer to implementing something on BEA, so just kicking off discussion again here. We all have our own views in certain areas and I'm not somebody who enjoys conflict, so I really want to try and do it in the best spirit possible, accepting that not everybody will get their own way.
The big thing that struck me from the previous discussion was the number of 'rock' derivative categories that were suggested compared to other styles of music. It's true that BEA has a big proportion of albums in this category and splitting it down further might help to break the numbers down, but equally the site needs to be balanced across the whole music spectrum as it's already accused externally of being a bit biased towards certain styles of music, and a category list weighted too much in one area will just reinforce that view.
To set out my own position, I believe the site needs between 12 and 20 top level 'categories' or 'genres' that each album can 'belong' to (some albums may belong to more than one category). These top level categories will provide a way for users to distinguish between different styles of music and help narrow down those that they'd like to check out further. Of course, music is much more nuanced than that, and the categories would also be supported by a tagging system which will add some further fine tuning (the tagging system will be added further down the line).
Just going with Spyglass suggestion (as seems to be quite sensible) that the original post needs three lists: one for accepted genres, one for debated genres, and one for rejected genres (plus some sample data which we can use for testing what might work the best).
The opening lists will have come from the biggest music databases on the internet, and we can be certain that thousands of engineering hours have already been put into coming up with them, so all bases should be covered by adapting a combination of these for own use on BEA. I'm going to put these lists in the following post to keep this one as short as possible (I may need to revise this post once we get started as not sure where this is going to go right now).
We could have a go at trimming these lists down to a set of categories that will work on BEA and try and find some type of consensus, but I think we should let that discussion evolve in this thread to see what people think. It also might be that the lists only make sense within themselves, and an amalgamation of all of them might be a bit messy, but we'll see how things pan out and nothing's set in stone. (To put it on the table, personally prefer AllMusic's schema if we look at them individually, but would feel a bit funny simply lifting it and it's probably not quite right for BEA).
Last edited by albummaster on 05/24/2020 14:20; edited 1 time in total
AllMusic Genre Categories:
Avant-Garde
Blues
Children's
Classical
Comedy/Spoken
Country
Easy Listening
Electronic
Folk
Holiday
International
Jazz
Latin
New Age
Pop/Rock
R&B
Rap
Reggae
Religious
Stage & Screen
Vocal
Amazon Genre Categories:
Blues
Broadway & Vocalists
Children's Music
Christian & Gospel
Classical
Classic Rock
Country
Dance & Electronic
Folk
Hard Rock & Metal
Holiday
Indie & Alternative
International
Jazz
Latin Music
Miscellaneous
New Age
Opera
Pop
R&B
Rap & Hip-Hop
Rock
Soundtracks
Discogs Genre Categories:
Blues
Brass & Military
Children's
Classical
Country
Dancehall
Electronic
Folk, World, & Country
Funk / Soul
Hip Hop
Jazz
Latino
Non-Music
Pop
Reggae
Rock
Stage & Screen
eBay Genre Categories:
Genre
Blues
Children's
Classical
Comedy & Spoken Word
Country
Dance & Electronica
Folk
Holiday
Jazz
Latin
Metal
Military
New Age & Easy Listening
Pop
R&B & Soul
Rap & Hip-Hop
Reggae, Ska & Dub
Religious & Devotional
Rock
Sound Effects & Nature
Soundtracks & Musicals
World Music
RYM Genre Categories:
Ambient
Blues
Classical Music
Comedy
Country
Dance
Electronic
Experimental
Field Recordings
Folk
Hip Hop
Industrial Music
Jazz
Metal
Musical Theatre and Entertainment
New Age
Pop
Psychedelia
Punk
R&B
Regional Music
Rock
Singer/Songwriter
Ska
Sounds and Effects
Spoken Word
[Other major sites welcome to be added but I think the above is probably enough]
Sample data (overall top 500 top 1,000 one album per artist):
Consolidated list compiled by babyBlueSedan (before any removals or merges)
Ambient
Avant-Garde
Blues
Brass & Military
Broadway & Vocalists
Children's
Christian & Gospel
Classical
Classic Rock
Comedy
Country
Dance
Dancehall
Easy Listening
Electronic
Experimental
Field Recordings
Folk
Folk, World, & Country
Funk / Soul
Hard Rock & Metal
Hip Hop (and Rap)
Holiday
Indie & Alternative
Industrial
International
Jazz
Latin Music
Metal
Military
Miscellaneous
Musical Theatre and Entertainment
New Age (and Easy Listening)
Non-Music
Opera
Pop (and/or Rock)
Psychedelia
Punk
R&B (and Soul)
Reggae (Ska, Dub)
Regional Music
Religious
Rock
Singer/Songwriter
Ska
Sound Effects & Nature
Soundtracks
Spoken Word
Stage & Screen
Vocal
World Music
Last edited by albummaster on 05/25/2020 08:39; edited 2 times in total
The opening lists will have come from the biggest music databases on the internet, and we can be certain that thousands of engineering hours have already been put into coming up with them, so all bases should be covered by adapting a combination of these for own use on BEA.
They are useful reference points for discussion, but I respectfully disagree with what's in bold. This was my suggested top-level list from the other thread:
African
Ambient
Asian
Blues
Caribbean
Classical
Country
Electronic
Folk
Hip-Hop
Jazz
Latin American
Metal [open to this being absorbed into rock]
Miscellaneous [for when none of the other top-levels apply]
New Age
Pop
R&B
Rock
Also, I would say our top-level genres should be designed with the goal of categorizing albums in general. The top 500 sample, while perhaps a useful reference point for discussion, is very unrepresentative. _________________ Join us in the canon game :) / Add me on RYM
babyBlueSedanUsed to be sort of blind, now can sort of seeProfile
So combining all the genre lists AM posted and removing duplicates gives this list:
Consolidated List
Ambient
Avant-Garde
Blues
Brass & Military
Broadway & Vocalists
Children's
Christian & Gospel
Classical
Classic Rock
Comedy
Country
Dance
Dancehall
Easy Listening
Electronic
Experimental
Field Recordings
Folk
Folk, World, & Country
Funk / Soul
Hard Rock & Metal
Hip Hop (and Rap)
Holiday
Indie & Alternative
Industrial
International
Jazz
Latin Music
Metal
Military
Miscellaneous
Musical Theatre and Entertainment
New Age (and Easy Listening)
Non-Music
Opera
Pop (and/or Rock)
Psychedelia
Punk
R&B (and Soul)
Reggae (Ska, Dub)
Regional Music
Religious
Rock
Singer/Songwriter
Ska
Sound Effects & Nature
Soundtracks
Spoken Word
Stage & Screen
Vocal
World Music
From that list, I think we can remove the following without much controversy:
Excluded genres
Brass & Military
Broadway & Vocalists
Children's
Christian & Gospel (could be under rock, pop, R&B, etc)
Classic Rock (under rock)
Dancehall
Easy Listening
Field Recordings
Folk, World, & Country (duplicative)
Funk / Soul (under R&B)
Hard Rock & Metal (under rock or metal)
Holiday
Indie & Alternative (under rock)
Industrial (under rock or electronic)
International
Military
Musical Theatre and Entertainment
Non-Music
Opera
Psychedelia
Punk (under rock)
Regional Music
Religious
Sound Effects & Nature
Soundtracks (a sound track has to be some kind of other music)
Spoken Word
Stage & Screen
Vocal
World Music
Which gives us this list, provided I copied correctly. Ones listed in red are ones I think we can further omit, with explanation below.
Pared down list Ambient
Avant-Garde
Blues
Classical
Country
Dance
Electronic
Experimental
Folk
Hip Hop
Jazz
Latin Music
Metal
Miscellaneous
New Age
Pop
R&B
Reggae (Ska, Dub)
Rock
Singer/Songwriter
Ska
A few notes here:
- I took some liberty in removing the "regional" / "world" / etc labels in favor of Latin Music and Reggae. I agree with Baystate that it would be nice to combine Reggae, Ska, and Dub into a Caribbean category and that African and Asian should have their own categories as well. Personally, I would find this very useful.
- Maybe it is controversial to remove some of the theater / holiday / broadway genres? Personally I think most of that could be tagged as another genre, though we might need a fallback just in case. Which leads me to...
- Avant-garde and experimental are obviously very close, so we would want to cut one of them. I'm not even sure experimental is a fitting category; I saw the analysis in the other thread about how most "experimental" music on RYM can be tagged as some other genre. I do think that we'll need something to tag weird releases with. Even if we don't use ambient, drone, or field recordings as top level genres there are still albums on the site that fit those categories. I like experimental better than Miscellaneous, but not everything that doesn't fit into a category (comedy, spoken word, opera) is experimental. So Miscellaneous might actually be the better catchall.
- I didn't note Singer/Songwriter as a non-controversial omission, but I think it's safe to say most if not all singer/songwriter stuff could be tagged as rock or pop.
- I'm not opposed to keeping both Dance and Electronic only because there's a big difference between Disco and Autechre. But I think the line between dance and pop would be hard to draw, so labeling it all as electronic is probably the best way to avoid uncertainty.
- I think Ambient could probably roll up under Electronic as well, though obviously it's not all electronic. Otherwise could be experimental/miscellaneous. I'm not really convinced there's enough of it for a top level genre though.
- Metal is really tough. I'm sure searching on only metal albums would be useful for a lot of people. But having a separate category for it but rolling all jazz and hip hop together seems to be giving preference to the more common genres here. And the line between what is rock and what is metal can be blurry sometimes. I think I'd lean towards omitting it but I don't have much of a preference.
So after all that my list would look pretty much like Baystate's, with the only differences being whether we need ambient and how to handle experimental/miscellaneous. I personally wouldn't be opposed to both Experimental (for drone, field recordings, etc) and Miscellaneous (for comedy, broadway, theater, etc) but I wonder if that's getting too detailed. _________________ And it's hard to be a human being. And it's harder as anything else.
SpyglassResident MetalheadProfile The red dot on the map
Metal and punk should be filed under rock, and rock should not be paired with pop. We can't call Justin Bieber and most electropop artists rock.
Combine avant-garde and experimental.
I'm gine with babybluesedan's method for handling experimemtal music and miscellaneous music, although I'd prefer the devision to keep ambient in the main list. _________________ Do it yourself and let me play my music: https://www.besteveralbums.com/thechart.php?c=61802
They are useful reference points for discussion, but I respectfully disagree with what's in bold.
This was my suggested top-level list from the other thread:
African
Ambient
Asian
Caribbean
Metal [open to this being absorbed into rock]
Miscellaneous [for when none of the other top-levels apply]
New Age
It's great to see people putting forward ideas and I appreciate you doing that, but the reason I pasted a few lists from other sites is because this problem has been tackled many times before. We can be absolutely certain that some of the world's best software engineers and data scientists are employed amongst these companies, yet none of them have chosen to name their genres after the name of countries or geographical regions. The names of regions look like oddities (why just list three regions, and not go the whole hog and also list South East Asia (or Asia), Oceania, etc). That's not to say we couldn't have a parallel schema where you could drill down from top level continents down to individual regions (BEA has that data already), but I think that should be an additional navigation mechanism and separate to browsing via music style.
baystateoftheart wrote:
Also, I would say our top-level genres should be designed with the goal of categorizing albums in general. The top 500 sample, while perhaps a useful reference point for discussion, is very unrepresentative.
The top 500 is what most people will see when they first land on BEA (or the current year/decade chart). I think you are right though that it probably excludes some minor genres that aren't so well represented in the overall chart. We could remove obvious duplicates (multiple albums by the same band), and add a few extra albums from genres that are not so well represented to improve the data sample.
@babyBlueSedan I think you've done a great job coming up with the consolidated list and pasted it into the second post on this thread as the starting point for further debate. You then posted some exclusions, a lot of which I agree with, but there are some that I don't.
Brass & Military + Military
Broadway & Vocalists / Musical Theatre and Entertainment / Stage & Screen/ Soundtracks
Children's
Christian & Gospel + Religious
Easy Listening
Holiday
International / World Music / Regional Music (there's a wider debate to be continued)
Sound Effects & Nature
Spoken Word
There's still debate to be had about a few of the above e.g. how to deal with soundtracks and theatrical releases (there's an argument to say they are a genre in their own right, especially in the case of movie scores or Broadway musicals, but even the Pulp Fiction soundtrack has audio clips from the movie overlaying some of the tracks (the Big Mac scene etc). Also, the 'world'/'international' category is the biggest thing that's unclear. Personally, I'd rather individual regions weren't listed as categories for reasons outlined above (this should be about musical style and not geographical origin).
The other problem is getting rid of too many categories that BEA requires a 'miscellaneous' option. Under all circumstances, I think this should be avoided. Categories like holiday are very useful around Christmas time. BEA has very few children's albums and brass and military etc, but do we have to forego these categories? Even 'religious music' and 'spoken word' do have a place for some albums, even though the numbers would be very small, as they don't fit into the other categories (even at a stretch) and classing them as miscellaneous indicates missing categories that could easily be added.
baystateoftheartNeil Young as a butternut squashProfile Massachusetts
They are useful reference points for discussion, but I respectfully disagree with what's in bold.
This was my suggested top-level list from the other thread:
African
Ambient
Asian
Caribbean
Metal [open to this being absorbed into rock]
Miscellaneous [for when none of the other top-levels apply]
New Age
It's great to see people putting forward ideas and I appreciate you doing that, but the reason I pasted a few lists from other sites is because this problem has been tackled many times before. We can be absolutely certain that some of the world's best software engineers and data scientists are employed amongst these companies, yet none of them have chosen to name their genres after the name of countries or geographical regions. The names of regions look like oddities (why just list three regions, and not go the whole hog and also list South East Asia (or Asia), Oceania, etc). That's not to say we couldn't have a parallel schema where you could drill down from top level continents down to individual regions (BEA has that data already), but I think that should be an additional navigation mechanism and separate to browsing via music style.
Amazon and eBay (and Discogs to a lesser extent) are commerce websites. If data is guiding their genre classifications, it would be with the aim of maximizing sales, which is a different aim than what we're going for. And if people want to put Discogs in a different category from Amazon and eBay, I'd say dancehall and reggae being two separate top-level genres is a strong example that it might not be a meticulously and soundly-designed system. RYM is a genre system built on community consensus, not by a group of experts. And I would wager that for AllMusic, the opinions of their professional music writers played more of a role in constructing the genre system than those of data scientists. Of course, that its own form of expertise. In any case, my point is that I disagree with an appeal to authority as a means of limiting our options.
To be clear, I am not suggesting that these genres encompass music in general from the named regions. Rihanna's music would not be under Caribbean, and K-pop would not be under Asian. These top-level genres encompass lots of smaller genres in folk/indigenous/regional styles. Southeast Asia is part of Asia, and there are simply not enough albums in traditional Pacific Island styles to justify a top-level genre. Also, I included four regions - why do you find Latin American to be more legitimate as a top-level genre? _________________ Join us in the canon game :) / Add me on RYM
baystateoftheartNeil Young as a butternut squashProfile Massachusetts
- I think Ambient could probably roll up under Electronic as well, though obviously it's not all electronic. Otherwise could be experimental/miscellaneous. I'm not really convinced there's enough of it for a top level genre though.
Ambient is distinct for a variety of reasons, including your point that it's not all electronic. In terms of whether there is enough of it for a top-level genre, check out these numbers for 2019 albums on RYM. A page has 100 albums.
Ambient = 15 pages of albums
Blues = 1 page of albums
Classical = 10 pages of albums
Country = 4 pages of albums
Jazz = 9 pages of albums
R&B = 6 pages of albums _________________ Join us in the canon game :) / Add me on RYM
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albummaster
baystateoftheart
babyBlueSedan
Spyglass
