Acclaimed music needs to sort the music by genre. Like split up hip hop and techno into different categories. That way, we can all know, for example, what the most acclaimed metal or rap album is.

I've always thought this would be an awesome option, but I understand how much extra work it would take.

Still, hopefully...

Quite apart from the work load, genre categorisation is hardly an objective science. Is Led Zeppelin heavy Metal?

That said, I agree it would be tremendously interesting.

I think it would be interesting but, like Snus, I think the toughest challenge is deciding what the genres ARE (Is power pop separate? Or does it go under pop? Do you have pop/rock so you don't have to decide where pop ends and 'rock' starts?) and deciding which album goes in which genre? (Are the Eagles country? Rock? Is Stevie Ray Vaughan blues or rock? Is R.E.M. rock or 'alternative'?)

For what it's worth, on my own personal Excel spreadsheets I do have a pie graph breaking out the songs I like by genre just to see how my tastes are evolving.

By my reckoning my top 5 genres are pop (27%), rock (20%), Christian contemporary (13%), country (11%), and R&B (10%).

very true, especially 'cause many of my favorite artists are those who defy categorization.

the only solution i can think of would be to do what allmusic does and place bands and albums into more than one genre. so put led zeppelin in rock and then the subgenres heavy metal and whatever they may be. then for any search by those genres, led zeppelin would come up and you'd see their ranks among rock acts, metal acts, hard rock, blues-rock, etc.

but that would be just too much work. remember Henrik that i do not expect, or even want, you to do any of this. i'm quite satisfied with how the site is now.

But didn't Henrik already do that? I am refering to the "Music Styles" part of this site. There you'll find Bad Brains, Black Flag and the Dead Kennedys under Hardcore Punk, Hall & Oates, Simply Red and Dusty Springfield under Blue-Eyed Soul, and The Backstreet Boys, Spice Girls and Britney Spears under Teen Pop, all based on AMG's suggestions. That work already has been done.

There's one big problem with it. Bill's talking about a music list, not an artist list. Basing it on the genres the artist belongs to, can produce strange results. Records The Byrds made in their country-rock period could end up in the Best Psychedelic List. Luckily, the good people at AMG also made genre & style listings for their albums.

Sean Pak and Klauw, the "Music Styles" listed by Henrik are, I think, the ones from allmusic.

Back when I had more unstructured time,

(SIDEBAR: the HOA reboot is underway, I promise--give me another day or two!)

I had thought about doing something like this; however, even for me, the amount of work is daunting.

On top of that, the biggest problem with sorting AM by genre is that very highly-ranked artists tend to be placed in a LOT of genres, which would produce very skewed results.

The Beatles, for instance, are listed as "psychedelic," but that would make for a psychedelic song list with "I Want to Hold Your Hand" in the top 5.

Another example: Radiohead is listed as Britpop. Whether that's true or not, does it make sense to have a Britpop albums list that includes The Bends, OK Computer and Kid A in the top six (and two Oasis, one Pulp, and no Blur)?

You could correct for these anomalies, but it would take a LOT of piecework.

I agree with schleuse, using the AM music styles would lead to some strange results that do not make much sense ...

... the genres from the RYM site will give the same effects, even though they recently changed the depth from assigning genres to artists only to assigning genres per release. But still, could give some strange results too ...

... and this apart from the fact that it is a huge amount of work to collect and distinguish all genres.

The idea is certainly great, but needs more brainstorming, I guess.

i guess you would have to assign a a bunch of genres to each individual song and album. is that information even available?

Reading all this got me to thinking about what I've done with the "genre" tag on all my iTunes songs. I realize that this is pretty in-depth, but bear with me.

AllMusic has 20 different genres, each genre is broken down into various sub-genres, and each sub-genre is broken down into various styles. Example: one genre is "pop/rock," which is broken down into 14 subgenres, one of which is "British invasion." That particular subgenre is broken down into eight styles: "British blues," "British invasion," "British psychedelia," "early British pop/rock," "freakbeat," "Merseybeat," "mod," and "psychedelic."

I went through AllMusic's pages and made a list of every style of music. According to my count, there's over 800 different styles of music. I then alphabetized the list of styles and assigned each one a three-digit number.

Then for each album I own, I went to that album's AllMusic page and looked at what AM listed as that albums styles. Example: for Elton John's s/t album, AM lists the styles as "album rock" (028 by my list), "pop/rock" (563), "rock & roll" (627), "singer/songwriter" (653), and "soft rock" (670). So for that album, the genre tag on my iTunes is: 028; 563; 627; 653; 670

I admit that it's a lot of work; it took me a long time to assign numbers to all 21,000 of my songs. But I can easily search for any song of a particular "style" just by searching for that style's particular three-digit code.

Does this make sense or am I just rambling as usual?

21,000 songs, all tagged? Wow!

Matt, your explanation is very interesting and does make a lot of sense.

Now, I don't use iTunes myself, but can you make some easy statistics on your collection with it? Like e.g. #songs per style, or in case you can also rate songs/albums, the number of songs/albums from a particular style with high rating?

Hi everyone,

I actually have a spreadsheet with AMG styles for all pre-2008 albums at Acclaimed Music. This amazing job was done by Marc Brinks (I don't know if he has written in the forum anytime) and I intend to use it in the next update, including top albums by style (although I just never seem to get any time to do the necessary programming).

Here's a link to the spreadsheet

Have a look at the spreadsheet. Do you agree with the classifications? If anyone would like to add the styles for albums from 2008 and those that will be added in the coming update, please let me know and I will prepare the sheet with additional rows.

Henrik, that's great!

I can volunteer to help you out with the missing styles and promise you that this will go faster than my hell-of-a-job with the RYM links.

While we're at it, I might as well confess that I have started a little project for the spare extra time that I still have. It is a rating application, similar to what BillAdama offered as Java application, but my version will be in Excel and it lets the user decide about the rating system, weights, filtering etc. More infos will follow whenever something tangible is available to offer you (bare me, I do have other things to do). The complete AM album and songs list could be used as a base there, and why not include these styles as an additional filter?

Re: Andre

Well, I guess I can't claim that ALL of my songs are tagged, but the vast majority of them are: all but 200 of them. And I admit that I had to get creative on a few of them...

I've got the CD "Unclassified" by Robert Randolph & the Family Band. AM does not list any styles for that particular album, but they list styles for Randolph's next album. So I used those styles. For other CDs, I simply put in what made the most sense.

As for statistics, I have a playlist in my iTunes for every individual style. Each playlist has instructions to search the tags for that particular three-digit code. So if I want to listen to music that is classified as "trip-hop," I have a playlist that searches all my songs for the "758" code. Currently, my "trip-hop" playlist has 582 songs in it.

In case you're interested, some of the big genre-specific playlists I have are...

"alternative pop/rock": 3817 songs
"indie rock": 3202 songs
"singer/songwriter": 1918 songs
"album rock": 2878 songs
"hard rock": 1336 songs
"pop/rock": 4692 songs
"rock & roll": 1885 songs

As for ratings, I try to rate as much of my music as I can (iTunes lets you rate songs on a scale of 1 to 5 stars), so I can search each of my genre playlists to find which ones I've rated higher than others.

By the way, if anyone is interested, let me know and I could probably be convinced to help someone have something similar.

Henrik,

I rebuild this list to a more simplified list with the most common styles. In this list you can easily filter on several styles. I can also send you this list by e-mail if you like, so you can share it with other AM-ers. The new albums are included and also some 2008 albums.

That sounds great, marc! Thanks!!

Matt -- I don't suppose you have that list of 800 kicking around, do you? Is it something that could be posted here?

Thanks for the explanations, Matt.

And here I am, always thinking that iTunes was solely connected to iPod or iPhone, so for people without such devices (like me) it would not be interesting to use. But I just had a look at itunes.com and it appears to be also useful to just manage and play your digital music and video collection on your PC ...

I even remember installing it on my PC a few years ago, so my brother could upload some stuff to his iPod, but I uninstalled it immediately afterwards. There was also something annoying about the program, don't recall what ... ?? Perhaps I should give it another try?

How about a link to my list? I'll put it up as a .txt file.

http://www.geocities.com/mrschroeder1982/genres.txt

Please be sure to read the disclaimer at the beginning. And e-mail me if there are any questions.

Thanks Matt; the list is great!

Just curious... on your iTunes, do you have the "show browser" option selected? If so, how many genres does it say you have? (I can't imagine what the number is, but it's probably really high.)

It says I have 2413 genres.