Categorizing music
When I started collecting MP3s many years ago I was obsessive about filling in blank ID3 tags. No more “Track 09 — Unknown Artist” for me. There was one problem: I didn’t know how to fill out the genre tag. I actually remember posting a message to a newsgroup asking how to know what counted as rock, pop, hip-hop, R&B, and so forth. Someone had created these categories and I wanted to use them, but I didn’t have a clue how to do it (Doctorow’s “People are stupid,” I suppose).
I was having a conversation about this with Michael Manoochehri who interjected that to some extent those are just commercial categories for music, which I hadn’t considered before. Nonetheless, there does seem to be at least some useful aspect of these categories: sometimes I feel like listening to music from one of them and not others. Using genres as categories is painting in broad strokes–different songs from the same album might properly belong to different genres, and an artist might move between genres during her career–a system like Pandora’s use of the music genome project might more accurately select what I want to hear.
While I tried to conform to what I imagined where norms for genre categorization, I had a friend who created an entire set of unique genres for her music. Instead of pop and rock, she changed everything to “Coffee Shop Grooves” or “Rocking the Suburbs” or something similarly unusual, effectively using the genre namespace to sort music into her own categories.
Categorizing music is an issue across borders as well. I saw these two signs in a record store in South America:
Note that Eminem has a couple albums in the “Black Music” section. Now there’s a funny categorization scheme for you.