Figuring Out Music Genres

I’ve been trying to reorganize my music collection. A few years ago, I digitized all my CDs. However, I’ve acquired more physical and digital music since then, and the file system needs to be redone.

The hardest thing about digital music for me is metadata. Being able to play music of a specific genre, group, etc. is useful, as well as my interest on the year of the song released. Genre is a particular issue because poorly selected genres make it more difficult to find the type of music you are in the mood for.

In researching this issue now, I came across the advice of Dan Gravell, who maintains a commercial product named Bliss that he wrote to solve his own digital music collection problems and sells. In his article, MP3 genres: one size does not fit all, he comments that a problem for owners of large MP3 collections is out of control genres. The solution he suggests mirrors what I was thinking. Come up with the genres you will allow in your collection and make sure all your music complies with this list. Here’s his starting list, compiled from the common elements of four different online music databases.

The Fundamental Music Genre List

Blues

Classical

Country

Electronic

Folk

Jazz

New age

Reggae

Rock

If you try to apply a list like this to a collection, you end up with a lack of balance. I, for example, have no Electronic in my collection that I know of. This is when you need to split your genres. What some would call sub-genres get promoted to better divide your music. You can then merge categories. For example, in my collection, Blues and Jazz would have to merge as I don’t have a large collection of either.

In addition to loading genres into metadata, they are a part of my filesystem organization. I still organize music into a directory structure of Genre -> Artist -> Album. Now, the simplest thing to do would be to eliminate that and go to Artist -> Album, but estimates are I have several hundred albums and artists. And multi-artist compilations seem to confuse it more.

By organizing it, I am hoping to get into the areas of my collection I forget I have and listen to more diverse playlists. It’s going to be a while though. At least I’m not alone in my problem.