> 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.
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".