INTERACT FORUM
More => Music, Movies, Politics, and Other Cheap Thrills => Topic started by: zxsix on November 28, 2016, 11:19:52 pm
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What do you think is the definitive source for artist metadata, specifically genre?
In discussing this with friends today, the overwhelming response was musicbrainz.
However, a random view of Evanescence (https://musicbrainz.org/artist/f4a31f0a-51dd-4fa7-986d-3095c40c5ed9/tags) will show that musicbrainz does not, in fact, specify a primary genre. Rather it list multiple genres and they are sorted alphabetically. So which single genre should be used? Which is the PRIMARY genre? How do you guys decide when tagging an artist newly added to your collection?
I'd rather not use semicolons and assign multiple genres per artist.
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A Very Long Debate That Will Never Be Answered To Everyone's Satisfaction.
I personalty Think There Are Too Many Genres.
This Is What I Use:
Top 100, Top 40, Top 20, Top 10, Country, Rock, R&B, Christmas, Trance, Techno, Dance/Exercise, Jazz, Rap, Old School Rap, Pop
One Think You Will Never See In My Collection Is "Opera" It Is The Only Type Of Music That I Will Not Listen To.
List of popular music genres
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_popular_music_genres (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_popular_music_genres)
The Most Definitive Music Genre List on the Web!
http://www.musicgenreslist.com/ (http://www.musicgenreslist.com/)
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Like he said, there is not a definitive answer. For me, the two big boys are Allmusic.com and Discogs.com .
Both take a similar approach of a two level system:
1. Top level genres that are pre-defined and never change. Somewhere between 12 and 18 of these in slightly broad categories like "Pop/Rock" and "Country".
2. A second level of Styles with many, many, many variations. For example, Guns N' Roses would be Genre: Pop/Rock and Styles: Hard Rock. Some might include other Styles for them as well, but I don't. Different albums from artists might be classified with different styles too. For example, "Faith" from The Cure might be classified as Genre: Pop/Rock and Styles: Goth Rock, New Wave, Post Punk . Another album from The Cure might be classified differently since their Goth Rock days ended somewhere after their 4th album or so.
Artists/Albums might have several top level Genres, but usually no more than two. For example, Robert Cray is both Genre: Pop/Rock and Blues (in my collection). Most of the more specific classification is done in the Styles section for most artists.
A note here: The stock fields [Genre] and [Style] don't easily accept multiple values. [Style] I believe is a single value field only. So I created [Styles] and use this instead. [Genre] on the other hand, can hold multiple values, but it's edit type is "standard" so you can't use Panes Tagging or any otherwise convenient ways of specifiying multiple values. You have to manually type ";" between each value. So, you can create a [Genres] field instead, make it a List type and make it's Edit type List as well. This makes it easy to specify multiple values with a click.
Good luck.
Brian.