Well, to a classical music afficionado, you might have "Gregorian, Rennaissance, Baroque, Classical, Romantic, Avant Garde, Contemporary, New Age, Popular". Even this is biased toward recency, and reflects my own lack of knowledge of pre-baroque music.
Or you could slice it by form: "Hymns, Choirs, Quartets, Symphonies, Concertos, Sonatas, Operas, Ballets, Rondos, Minuets, Gavottes, Chaconnes, Themes & variations, Musicals, Film scores, Popular & rock music."
Or by instrument: "Harpsichord, Piano, harp, Violin, Viola, Cello, Flute, Oboe, Clarinet, French Horn, Bassoon, Trumpet, Trombone, Tuba, Guitar, Percussion, Electric Instruments".
I think the general point is that categories depend upon the listener. You can't impose a categorization on data without understanding who the audience is and what their mental model of the field is. And the more expertise you gain in a field, the deeper your categorization gets.
> Even this is biased toward recency, and reflects my own lack of knowledge of pre-baroque music.
This is random, but one of the things I love about Civilization IV is that when you enter a new era, it plays music from that era, to really give you the sense of moving through time.
Except that when you enter the "Medieval" era, it plays this:
A brilliant piece of music, and a great credit to them that they would have chosen this piece and this recording of it. An absolute masterpiece. Of the High Renaissance, that is. Sheppard was born c. 1515, and the Renaissance in music is usually dated to begin somewhere around 1400.
> Well, to a classical music afficionado, you might have "Gregorian, Rennaissance, Baroque, Classical, Romantic, Avant Garde, Contemporary, New Age, Popular".
You're just complaining then about what the top-level nodes are on the classification tree of music genres. If you have Classical with Gregorian as a sub-genre that's the same thing as having Gregorian as a top-level genre. Same with OP's problem with "World Music" genre (except for the culturally insulting aspect of it).
The only time it could possibly matter is if the system doesn't have sub-genres... but that would be a pretty ridiculous system.
Really genres suck for a different reason, because they are vague and overlapping and subjective. What I want is a composable classification system with actual objective traits about the music... so I can say "female lead singer, german language, trumpets, beats-per-minute 80-120" and so forth. I don't know if such music exists, but I would listen to it if I could find it.
edit: didn't realize the Songza doesn't have any sub-genres of Classical, so include it as a "pretty ridiculous system".
Pandora has that on the backend - they will tell you why they recommended a song, and it's often things like "female lead singer, heavy metal beat, fast tempo". I don't think they manually let you enter in values for the different dimensions in their database to search, though.
I don't think there's anything wrong with that sort of detailed classification, but I think it's simply out of scope for a consumer-facing music product.
