If you could classify music into ten or fewer genres... Options

[thedodgymonkey]

I am trying to classify all my music into quite broad genres. If you could only have ten or less categories for your music what would they be?
Okay, I don't have any completely bazaar music like a Panda playing The Bamboo Flute or my own rendition of Mozart's 5th using bottles and spoons!!!

This post has been edited by thedodgymonkey: Jun 4 2009, 00:03

[r0k]

Wow, that's an interesting topic you unearthed here
Musical classification is subject to MUCH discussion and i'm not sure it's possible to find one that pleases everyone, especially with so few genres. However, too many genres leads to confusion and unusable classifications so in this case, fewer is better.
Probably, a few genres further divided into sub-genres/styles (when using a good player able to read any tag usch as foobar2000 ) is a good compromise between usabality and diversity.
Here is my personal "about a dozen" genres list.

• Blues, Jazz
• Classical (not to be confused with "old" of course)
• Electronic (everything synth/sampler based, including disco, dance, new age ...)
• Folk, World (european medieval, celtic, country music, traditional african or asian music, french "chanson" ... even if it's something recent)
• Latino
• Metal (metal has grown too big and too varied to be considered a single solid style under rock. Death metal, symphonic metal, gothic metal, power metal ... )
• Rock (and all it's styles including "pop-rock")
• Soundtrack (movies, video-games, Broadway ...)
• Reggae (and many reated styles)
• Soul, R&B (including children styles like hip-hop and rap)
• Religious (no matter the religion)
• Child music (i guess we need it)

I purposefully refused to use a "pop" genre because there is no one pop but many pops and they can all fit into other genres. Pop is mostly "mainstream" and as such there can be pop-rock, electro-pop, pop-folk ... The only "real" pop to me is pop-rock as popularised by bands such as the Beatles and this one obviously fits into Rock.
Of course, this is largely biased by my own musical preferences. Other people might not agree to make Metal a main genre but i really couldn't fit all my metal albums inside "Rock/Metal", i have too many, and they are way too diverse.

<dreamer mode on>
It might be interesting to gather a "definitive" list of musical genres, and obviously can't be done by a single person. The musical classifications changes from site to site. While it's true that many artists don't really fit well inside a single genre/style. Most have a highly dominent style. It would be nice if every site/marketplace could use the same genres for the same artist
<dreamer mode off>