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[GreggP]

I'm curious to know how other people create smartlists based on sub-genres or styles of music.

For example, if I want to create a smartlist for electronic/rock music. I would include the genres Electronic and Pop/Rock. There are all sorts of sub-genres within Pop/Rock that could qualify for this list, like Indie Electronic and Experimental Rock. The type of artists I might include would be Radiohead, Brian Eno (some of his albums are in the Pop/Rock genre but are still electonic in style), Sigur Rós, Soft Machine, The Flaming Lips, Sterolab, etc. But, I don't want to create a smartist with a long list of artists. I'd like to simply filter on the sub-genres.

So far, I've been using a user-generated tag named STYLE and I've extracted the metadata info from AMG (All Music Guide), which is a good resource for this sub-genre information.

Is there a better way?

Should I be using a different, standard tagging method that's supported by various tagging services?

[HPBEME]

Did you know that if you add a back-slash (\) after the primary genre tag, what you enter following that automatically defines the sub-genre (or style)?  So no need to create a user defined style field - just enter Rock\Electronic.

Then create a view or smartlist and add rules that filter the specific genre(s) and/or sub-genre(s) you want to include - there is no limit on the number and combinations.

[MusicBringer]

...so is the setting British;Blues the same as British\Blues ?

[EnglishTiger]

...so is the setting British;Blues the same as British\Blues ?

I'm curious as to where you found British;Blues mentioned as a genre since British is a Nationality and not a Genre. However there is a genre called "British Blues" used for some Eric Clapton, Animals and Fleetwood Mac tracks

[HPBEME]

...so is the setting British;Blues the same as British\Blues ?

No.

Using a semicolon as a separator in the genre tag will create a unique genre for each semicolon used.  Using a backslash "\" as a separator creates a sub-genre, which when shown in a Pane style view displays a very convenient and organized indented list.

For the pic below, I created a genre tag British; Blues, and another genre tag Rock\British\Blues.  You can clearly see how MC manifests the difference.  This is very useful IMO, since when the list is collapsed, I only have to navigate 7 top level primary genres vs. having to scroll through a list of 100+ genre, sub-genre, and styles all mixed together.  I then only need to expand a specific primary genre to see the associated sub genres as needed.

[eve]

beets + metadata stored in yaml files scraped from a few private sources is the 'best' way to get detailed subgenres IMO

I'd really like to do my entire library but it's a big effort and I don't think I have it in me.