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Creating another thread to start a fresh discussion. It is now clear to me that the genre system on this website needs to stay really simple. Which alienates people who are used to more rigid genre systems. When you search the web (e.g. wikipedia) for information on musical genres, you get a rigid, intricate hierarchy of labels, all with very specific meanings and scopes. I want to minimize that here at AP. IMHO there are a few iconic subgenres that should be here (as in: represented by a specific tag), but most of the music should be categorized using combinations of simple tags. An example of a specific subgenre that is meaningful is "Krautrock". It would be strange to replace that with "German Prog Rock". On the other hand, "Neo Prog" can be modelled by assigning "Neo", "Prog" and "Rock". The resulting genre label would be "Neo Prog Rock", which seems fine to me. I also think that it is best to always have the "Non-Prog/Prog-Adj/Prog" part in the genre label, at least by default. Which means that for Krautrock, if it is prog, you would assign "Prog", "Rock" (main genre) and "Krautrock", and the resulting label would be "Prog Krautrock". Sounds a bit redundant on a prog website, doesn't it? In those cases we could try to get creative. In this special case, we could say "Krautprog". But then the non-prog bands would still be "Non-Prog Krautrock". Confusing ... I think it's best to keep things simple. So "Prog Krautrock" it is! What do you think? | |
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My main concern with the traditional genre approach is that it tends to get very complicated, and especially for progressive music, bands rarely conform to a really specific subgenre. So you end up with a long list of subgenres which apply for a given release. Adding an elaborate tree of subgenres (and subsubgenres etc.) is also a lot of work and complicated to use. At the same time, it's not really useful for finding new awesome music to listen to. While browsing you need really basic filters, otherwise you won't get many results. That is why I will keep the current system of combining simple tags. The downside is that sometimes the genre labels are a bit strange and/or redundant (as in "Prog Krautrock"). The upside is that it is easy to understand, especially when I outline the principle in the editor (coming up shortly), and also that it is also intuitive to use the simple tags as filters ("select everything that is prog, symphonic and heavy"). | |
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BTW: What do you think about coming up with new genre shorthand names / monikers? Like these:
Those could be useful for the tags badges, which need to be as short as possible. In the details view we could expand those monikers into their parts. And of course there should be a table somewhere listing all these prog genre "shorthands". | |
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yep, seems to be a reasonable solution, I even would not complain regarding the metal categories when all shorthand monikers simply would tell 'Metal Prog' or 'Prog Metal' | |
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For "Metal" I would keep the "Prog Metal" label, since it's already short and well established. So if you assign "Prog" and "Metal" it would be "Prog Metal", but if you then also assign a metal subgenre, the system would ommit the "Metal" part for some of them, like "Death", "Black", "Thrash" and "Doom". A genre like "Metalcore" would not be affected, so "Prog" + "Metal" + "Metalcore" would still yield "Prog Metalcore", as it does today. The strangest of these monikers is probably "Prog Black". It's unusual, but I think that it makes sense intuitively. | |
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just a minor issue, it seems subgenre 'Zeuhl' is not available, except genre 'Rock' will be chosen. But Zeuhl also has a strong relation to Jazz, at least in the same way, if not even more dominant. Thus with the current setup I also have to chose 'Rock' as a second genre. |