Followup on standardization of tagging music genres
So, as a followup to the music tagging thread from a few days ago, I would like to propose the following for discussion.
- Should all musical posts be tagged with at least one high-level musical genre?
The consensus from the last post appeared to be a yes on this. Please note:, this doesn't mean that anyone who submits a track is required to go look up / determine the best genre themselves. If they choose not to, one of the tag mods may do so for them while browsing. Further, we seemed to reach a consensus last time that in the future it would be best to automate this step as completely as possible.
- Which tags do we want to use?
I / @Whom have done some digging and found several different schemes we might use as a basis. For convenience, I've reproduced them in a table for you below:
<html> <head> <body>| FreeDB | Discogs | Wikipedia | Allmusic | Rate Your Music |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Blues | Blues | Blues | Blues | Ambient |
| Classical | Brass & Military | Classical | Classical | Blues |
| Country | Children's | Country | Country | Classical Music |
| Folk | Classical | Electronic | Electronic | Comedy |
| Jazz | Electronic | Folk | International | Country |
| Newage | Folk, World, & Country | Hip-hop | Jazz | Dance |
| Reggae | Funk / Soul | Jazz | Latin | Electronic |
| Rock | Hip-hop | Reggae | Pop/Rock | Experimental |
| Soundtrack | Jazz | Religious | R&B | Field Recordings |
| Latin | Rock | Rap | Folk | |
| Non-Music | Traditional | Reggae | Hip Hop | |
| Pop | Industrial Music | |||
| Reggae | Jazz | |||
| Rock | Metal | |||
| Stage & Screen | Musical Theatre and Entertainment | |||
| New Age | ||||
| Pop | ||||
| Psychedelia | ||||
| Punk | ||||
| R&B | ||||
| Regional Music | ||||
| Rock | ||||
| Singer/Songwriter | ||||
| Ska | ||||
| Sounds and Effects | ||||
| Spoken Word |
</body> </html>
I think ideally we will be able to come up with (say) a list the size of wikipedia, allmusic or discogs such that determining the right genre isn't much of a burden on tag mods. In the future, we could expand this or even start inheriting the RYM genre hierarchy (e.g., Ska -> 2 Tone, Jamaican Ska, Spouge, Third Wave Ska)
So with that out of the way, I think the best way to proceed is for each of you to either:
A) Build a list of your own with one of these as a basis. We can count up how many people include a genre an count as a vote for it's inclusion.
Or
B) Argue for / against a specific genre's inclusion.
Sound good? Did I miss anything?
I will likely ignore the "world" tag/label.
It's pointless because all music is world music. It's almost as dumb as "ethnic" music.
I'm honestly not too hung up on classifying/over compartmentalising stuff. I'll do my best to put a relevant tag on what I post though.
I agree it's a very American/Western-centric genre name, but I don't agree that it has no place, but typically it's best applied alongside an additional genre like "funk"
and that's perfectly fine too.
My personal preference would look something like:
Blues
Classical
Electronic
Folk / Americana / Country
WorldFunk / Soul
Hip-hop
Jazz
Pop
Reggae
Rock
Metal
Non-genre specific tags (likely optional, but good information):
I feel like we should at the very least specify the kind of rock. You'll get a very different sound with Periphery (djent/ melodic metal) compared to, say, Muse (Alt rock/prog rock). Maybe rock.alt or rock.metal or rock.indie? I don't want to be that genre guy, but there is a reason genres are so heavily contested in the rock world
And somehow I entirely missed Metal! I think the prog / indie distinction is an important one, but these are supposed to be top level tags (so for instance if they were groups it would be ~music.rock, which contains ~music.rock.prog, etc.)
There's certainly nothing prohibiting more descriptive tags like you suggest (and obviously I would encourage it)
I'm very picky about the different between Math Rock and Post-Rock so I getchu
I'd axe world in favor of having people put the country of origin or the 'scene' that spawned it if they know the name. We're going to get a lot of overlap between folk, country, americana, bluegrass, and roots rock since only about 1 in 20 people can tell them apart. I'd also like the site to punch anyone who uses the word Indie in the face when they click on submit, but that's just me. :P
A single big-bucket tag like these is definitely the best choice until the site is doing the tagging for us during the submission process. Most people can narrow down most music to these categories without having to look it up. It'd also be nice to get everyone tagging live performances as [live] and [date] and adding the [year] on singles/albums.
I'd also like a [fresh] tag for new releases that auto-deletes itself after 30 days. ;)
Yeah, I was kind of envisioning something like those giant genre buckets we do for the best-of. Like, American Primitivism is really none of those things, but often would get thrown into this bucket.
Yeah, I see this argument as well (and it's much more descriptive than 'world') but adds a lot more complexity at this stage (like, try to remember off-hand where Hugh Masekela was from? I'm pretty sure SA, but...?). World is a nice huge bucket to lump on without too much fuss. Continent tags like 'Afro' might be a good compromise?
Weeeeelll, we know how both you and I feel about like this.
The suggestions for [live] / [date] / [year] / [fresh] are all good ones as well
People are definitely going to use [fresh] all the time, it's an unstoppable trend. When faced with that, the only choice is to make it work for us instead of against us. If it self-deletes, problem solved forever. That functionality would also be handy for [breaking] tags in news communities, and I'm sure in plenty of other places as well.
Agreed, plus once we get a MB lookup going, we might be able to auto-populate the fresh tag for most cases (which would help if / when we start adding popularity / repost filters)
Let's avoid filtering on Tildes. That never set well with me on reddit, but we didn't have any choice there. Here, thank deimos, we do. Instead let's just make sure the [repost] tag is an inescapable demon that forever haunts all of the ghosts of threads from the past. Then people can just filter out [repost] and never have to see it.
It'd be nice to get the URLs for reposts in the sidebar too, so that it has a little mini-history of say the last five times the thing was posted. In fact, that'd be pretty cool for artists as well - if the sidebar contains links to other threads from that artist.
See, I'd actually like to go the other way and give users a slider in their settings that says something like:
And something like that for artists as well. That might adversely affect database I/O though? I dunno, not my specialty :p
The reason being is that once something gets a [repost] tag under your solution, it's dead forever until the user unfilters out all reposts
edit: I also really like the sidebar link to the other artist threads. Someone in the last thread suggested tagging artist names in submission itself to enable something similar that would be possible right now
Well, that is kinda what people who spend their days bitching about reposts want. That's hardly most people though. I doubt I'd bother filtering them myself. Keeping track of 'artist last seen on xx-xx-xx' is a cool idea, and it worked well enough for the repost filters in listentothis and music. I love the idea of giving people control over the time window like that so they can lens in and out however they like when cratedigging through Tildes archives.
Maybe we should extend that philosophy to all of the content all over tildes. It does seem better and more useful than simple [repost] tagging, since it can unhide content that's very old and maybe should be reposted while still cutting down on release-day dupes and circlejerk favorites.
A few things: I echo the objections everyone else has with "World" (which becomes especially pointless since we can do multiple tags and include location if we want, imo), and I'm of the mind that blues should be included as a kind of folk music, though the timeline of that always makes it weird ("folk" as an idea coming later but still including blues musicians...). Also, I have a feeling there's a strong opinion behind not including any "experimental" tag, care to explain this? I imagine you'd rather have it be a modifier than a genre tag in its own right, but I feel like it's much more meaningful to describe things that are hard to categorize with that rather than whatever the closest category would be.
Despite those complaints, I think this is a plenty good top level and I'm cool with trying to make it "a thing" if others are on board with it.
Ok, so it seems people really don't like the World tag. I do wonder where things like afrobeat, cumbia or calypso would go... Perhaps that's about where we draw the line on the hierarchy? Since those things are really genres in their own. I could get behind that
There's definitely some overlap, but I wouldn't think of someone like Freddie King and 'folk' in the same sentence.
Yeah, you pretty much nailed my feelings there -- you can make experimental jazz, experimental rock etc., it's more how you make it / how it's different than 'mainstream' than what it is. I think a good thing to remember however (as I just realized after the many various 'world' comments) is that not everything has to fit cleanly into one of these genres. For instance there are undoubtedly songs out there for which 'experimental' is the right base tag, but I don't feel like it's a ton of things -- similar for avante-garde or art (which someone else suggested)
You know I'm thinking about the World tag more and even though it does solidify the list as even more eurocentric...I think some kind of big Other is going to be necessary. "World" is a weird way to put it, but there should be something.
I'm not gonna push this one that far, honestly. I think of it that way for historical purposes and my own listening but I also recognize that anything like this has to be some kind of compromise between a bunch of different factors and this isn't something worth making a stink about.
I get what you mean, I just struggle to think where I would post some weird droney tape music or something. There's also a lot of music that exists for the sake of artistic experimentation that I think is worth separating out. I feel like there's something missing if there isn't a place for music that has its own accompanying pretentious-but-also-cool essay attached. You're right that not everything needs to have a distinct place of its own and that that's fine, but imo Experimental music is wide and notable enough to warrant its own spot.
I like this grouping of top levels the most.
I really like RYM's grouping the most but I don't really think it's necessary to go that far into separation for submitting stuff here, at least at this point. And like you said, expansion would be possible if it became necessary.
I think the only thing that I might add to this group is Ambient, which I don't really think falls under too much of the other things here except for Electronic in obviously electronic cases.
edit: on World: this slipped my mind but yeah my thoughts are pretty similar in that specific location tags kind of make it not that necessary of a thing.
@Whom, I don't know if notifications get sent off for username mentions in posts, so I may be double tagging you :p
@Kat tagging you too
What does Musicbrainz have to say about this?
I was actually shocked to find that MB doesn't support Genre's natively!
You might find this interesting/useful. Found it floating around in the most recent MB discussion. Looks like your list hits the highlights.
Ahhh nice!
If you add
|:---|:---|:---|:---|:---|between the first and second rows of the table, it will make the first row a proper title row.Ahh, yeah I actually used an HTML table because the tool I was using for Markdown was acting up. I'll bold it though
edit: it's a real table now :p
What are people's thoughts on hierchical tags. Like indi.rock etc.
We discussed it a bit in the last thread.
The main takeaways: