I’m going to make a music genre chart. Maybe I’ll even make it interactive someday. Look for it in the menu bar. Here’s why I’m doing it.
I’ve spent a lot of time on allmusic lately, reading about bands, trying to find new music, etc. It’s a pretty good site, if the reviews are only of variable quality (the editors subscribe to the ‘popularity is directly proportional to quality’ school of reviewing’) The information seems very accurate, and the sheer amount of material included is quite overwhelming.
So, if anybody should know about music genres, what they are, and what define them, it should be allmusic, right?
Not so much.
Their rock genre page alone has some 300 genres listed. The other broad genre pages aren’t quite so bad – and the classical page is sadly deficient – but my overall impression has been “big mess”.
So why do I even care, you ask?