Sort Overall by Genre/Sub-Genre - Suggestions

Spyglass
Resident Metalhead

Gender: Male
Location: The red dot on the map

Will that fly?

Actually, we should start with deciding on a proper system.
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PurpleHazel

Anything about music's on-topic for the Music forum. It'd be your/my/ the users' thread/poll -- wouldn't be binding or anything. Isn't the system up to the mods?

Spyglass
Resident Metalhead

Gender: Male
Location: The red dot on the map

We can still offer suggestions and discuss it. And I could be wrong but Albummaster's dedication to copying and studying external genre catalogues might be a good omen.
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albummaster
Janitor

Gender: Male
Location: Spain
Site Admin

Apologies for being very slow to respond. Day job is super-busy (which I guess is good but also quite frustrating with regards to making progress here).

I'm exceedingly grateful for everbody's feedback as it really helps to clarify (or muddy!) what might work on BEA. I'd also like to sorry right here if some of my posts have been a bit abrupt recently, it's just very difficult juggling everything right now within the free time that I have.

Spyglass wrote:

Wouldn't there be some people who would like to discover Non-English albums for that sake alone? Having a "traditional" or "international" tag could be useful. As for reggae, explaining that it's regional may not stop complaints, but it's a perfectly reasonable justification which needs not warrant a change in the placement, which would spark another reasonable argument for the original point, and vise-versa.

There's no simple answer to that. Internationally, English-speaking culture is dominated by certain genres of music, and each of these countries will also have their own country and regional specific genres/styles that might be entirely different to any of the top-level genres but are not as popular internationally. It's certainly a bit of a cludge to try and sandbox everything else into one box, but less than 5% of albums on BEA probably fall into this (mis)category but it would simplify browsing the site for the vast majority of people if there weren't too many top level categories.

Spyglass wrote:

I don't care for the "&" categories listed above. We could have a music map discussion thread to sort out a map of the styles separated by specific category, and we'd obviously have some overlapping styles like "jazz-funk." But big genres like rock and metal DO NOT NEED MORE THAN ONE PRIMARY CATEGORY. Keeping everything at one per style is perfectly fair and fine. Pop. Rock. Move on. If you want to separate metal from rock, it's understandable, although it's also debatable.

Agree, in favour of keeping as few top level categories as possible.

Spyglass wrote:

Tagging genres based on a chart alone should be restricted to people with the ability to make either year charts or custom charts. Level 6 isn't too far off of a score. If we have a music map, we could use a "select style" function when a genre-central chart is being created. By marking it with a specific genre from a music map list, the chart could count as "official." For new users to come in and potentially abuse the system creates a risk, especially if they are serious about the points system. I achieved level 4 in a few days through release moderation and chart sizes, and it won't take much longer for a new user to acquire the score needed.

I'd certainly trust all users here to edit any genre/category/tagging info, with some kind of supporting system to help achieve consensus as this is more subjective than other areas of data admin. Votes could possibly lead to points to encourage participation.

baystateoftheart wrote:

think there are so many smaller genres that we'll need a miscellaneous category for cases in which no top-level genre fits. We can create additional top-level genres if a need becomes evident. Some of the genres from the reference list albummaster created that I left out of this draft didn't have any sonic cohesiveness and are therefore more descriptions than genres. One example is religious music, which can be sonically rooted in classical, a variety of folk styles, rock, and more. Other examples include holiday, stage & screen, vocal, and soundtracks. Tougher calls to exclude as top-level genres included dance, experimental, and punk. Happy to discuss my thinking further.

Appreciate you putting something out there. Not sure about having specific geographical categories and I'd personally combine further a few more of them e.g. ambient and electronic (although 'ambient' can be quite a loose term depending on how you interpret it). I'd probably also combine pop, rock and metal like AllMusic and a few others have done (as the aim is just to broadly categorise at the top level). Also, the issue of some albums fitting into multiple categories hasn't been addressed yet e.g. compilations by various artists may require the need for multiple categories to be assigned. I'm rambling away, but really just thinking to myself as i write this what utility genres will provide. I personally just see it as more a top-level navigational mechanism, and second level tagging would evolve more organically and not be so constrained.

The "disco" debate is interesting as well (no answer really). Where would people expect to find disco (R&B sounds the best suggestion so far). It's too narrow as a top level genre. The whole thing is very difficult, and it's probably why every site has their own way of doing it.

Spyglass wrote:

Here's a prototype for mainline styles and their biggest subgenres. Some of these entries will be empty to keep in line with the current discussion.

Ambient: Space Ambient, Dark Ambient
Blues
Country
Electronic: House, Techno, Trance, Downtempo
Folk: Traditional Folk
Hip Hop: I'll let the hip hop specialists play with this style.
Jazz: Bebop, Smooth Jazz, Avant-Garde Jazz
New Age: Neoclassical New Age, New Age Pop
Pop:
Rock: Metal, Punk, Alternative
R&B: Soul, Funk, Disco

Miscellaneous: Psychedelia, Soundtracks, Experimental, Theater and Entertainment

I think that list is getting nearer, possibly merge pop and rock and add soundtracks & theatre either as a top level attribute in the same way that BEA has compilations (and now live) albums because a movie soundtrack will probably also belong to a particular genre (e.g The Harder They Come might fall under Reggae etc). Theatrical or game soundtracks might be different (but they probably also have their own style). If an album is some type of soundtrack, this is a statement of fact and not open to much interpretation, whereas "is it heavy metal?" might be (if the genre isn't clear and you're a purist etc).

Personally, gong back to the geographical naming, I'd rather name the categories after their styles and not their place of origin as it just seems inconsistent to do otherwise and some albums derivative of reggae (ska etc) might be produced outside the Caribbean etc so it doesn't feel right.

Spyglass wrote:

My proposal is that one of us, preferably a moderator or Albummaster himself, create an "official prototype list" of the most primary and practical genres, and further submit this list to greater discussion concerning the proper order. We have a lot to talk about: putting metal into rock or separating the two, which cultures get their own, the possibility of including a miscellaneous list and what should qualify as miscellaneous, the level that users can achieve the ability to perform tagging, etc. (On that subject, we should incorporate lesser genres that are more known for overlapping than stand-alone performance, such as experimental, industrial, dance, psychedelia, etc.) By the end of, say two weeks tops, we finally have an official list and go from there.

If Albummaster has the time to program the feature, we need to discuss how to include it after that. We've discussed several options, including freelance Last.fm tagging, voting, moderating the albums' genres, tagging the custom charts directly, and I may be missing a few. We create a thread devoted to voting for the best format, and whichever wins becomes the new format.

I'm happy with that, but can see it getting quite messy in the forums unless the first post in the thread contains the evolved list with any edits marked underneath with reasons for removal/change (then there's going to be a lot of disagreements over what's been included (or not). After that, there's quite a lot of work to do to actually build it! As well, it's likely to happen in phases, with not everything done at once (bearing in mind there's a hell of a lot of work happening behind the scenes just to keep the site running, plus i'm already working on a forum upgrade which is taking a huge amount of time, plus I've got a day job which gets in my way (but pays my bills...).

Sorry this post isn't more organised, but definitely helped evolve how this might work, and I'll post back when i get another break...

Spyglass
Resident Metalhead

Gender: Male
Location: The red dot on the map

I think your diagnosis was properly handled. My concern is what the first "phase" would be now, because that's what we need: a real start.
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Do it yourself and let me play my music: https://www.besteveralbums.com/thechart.php?c=61802

albummaster
Janitor

Gender: Male
Location: Spain
Site Admin

Yes, no time like the present, and could do with a poke now and again. Wink

Going back to your post, you proposed creating some kind of prototype list and then soliciting feedback.

Just thinking of a mechanism that would allow us to arrive at a final list in a way that results in something that's coherent AND that people can buy into (not everybody will agree with the final list, possibly including myself, as there is no 'correct' list). The 'correct' list is the one that will fit and work the best on BEA, given that it's a specialist album site and only focuses on a subset of the 'best' albums (so the database is smaller than some other sites).

To prove that whatever top-level category list 'works', we also need a reasonable sample of albums to decide if that list is fit for purpose. I propose for simplicity that the sample of albums be the top 500 albums on BEA (overall chart). This is a large enough sample that all top-level genres should be represented, but not too large that it's overwhelming (and easy for most people to use since the overall chart can be downloaded into a spreadsheet via CSV download).

We already have various category lists on this thread put forward by different people, so these could be harvested and combined into a full list (with duplicates) and then we could work out how these duplicates could be culled to end up with one list of no more than 12-20 entries. I began doing this earlier in the thread from external sources, but perhaps we should have a second stab also including the member lists that have already been posted here and have a gigantic list that we can publicly cull down (that's not going to please everyone and assumes all the categories we need are already posted here).

Once the top level list is determined, then the next phase would be to work out how the secondary tagging will work, but just parking that to one side at the moment and focusing on the list of top-level categories, we need a way of voting/deciding these which is something i'm just pondering now Think

Spyglass
Resident Metalhead

Gender: Male
Location: The red dot on the map

I dunno. Most of what you said are things I'd back up, but grabbing every single little genre we've already listed and putting it together in a whopper alphabetical list seems like a lot to cull when most of it is pretty obvious.

And I need to point something out (I just thought of this). It was my idea to put psychedelia under miscellaneous, but once the genres overlap do we wanna see The Doors, Jimi and The Beatles classified as a "miscellaneous" band? I'd get behind industrial, experimental and darkwave going under miscellanuous. If we call experimental rock albums miscellaneous, it might be proper, considering that it might be awkward but understandable to classify TVU&N and Trout Mask Replica as miscellaneous.

An OP for the potential discussion should carry several reserved posts for future updates, and the original post needs three lists: one for accepted genres, one for debated genres, and one for rejected genres.
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Do it yourself and let me play my music: https://www.besteveralbums.com/thechart.php?c=61802

albummaster
Janitor

Gender: Male
Location: Spain
Site Admin

Spyglass wrote:

I dunno. Most of what you said are things I'd back up, but grabbing every single little genre we've already listed and putting it together in a whopper alphabetical list seems like a lot to cull when most of it is pretty obvious.

We'd get rid of the obvious duplicates straight away... (anything with the same name)

Spyglass wrote:

And I need to point something out (I just thought of this). It was my idea to put psychedelia under miscellaneous, but once the genres overlap do we wanna see The Doors, Jimi and The Beatles classified as a "miscellaneous" band? I'd get behind industrial, experimental and darkwave going under miscellanuous. If we call experimental rock albums miscellaneous, it might be proper, considering that it might be awkward but understandable to classify TVU&N and Trout Mask Replica as miscellaneous.

Not sure where the miscellaneous 'genre' comes from, but personally not in favour of it. If we're saying anything by Chopin or Vivaldi are 'classical', then surely it's not too much of a stretch to say that some of the above can't belong to the top level category of 'Rock' (e.g. VU, CB etc). Miscellaneous is not something I'd be in favour of at all as people wont think to look for anything in there.

Spyglass wrote:

An OP for the potential discussion should carry several reserved posts for future updates, and the original post needs three lists: one for accepted genres, one for debated genres, and one for rejected genres.

I'd also say we should leave some room for assigning sample data to the proposed categories, so we can see if the schema 'works' or not.

Spyglass
Resident Metalhead

Gender: Male
Location: The red dot on the map

A reserved post should handle that latter part.
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Do it yourself and let me play my music: https://www.besteveralbums.com/thechart.php?c=61802