| They pretty much nail the limitations of "genre" in the second paragraph. It's a blunt way to organize a record store, when you can only group physical products one way. Genres are deeply ingrained in people's heads, but they're a vestige from record stores and radio stations with limited playlists targeted at specific mass-market demographic points. The more you listen and explore on your own, the less meaningful they are. Sure, people say things like, "well I'm listening to a lot of jazz these days." They might even specify "bebop." But those tags are only slightly meaningful, and as others have illustrated in the comments, it's still limited and misleading. And whatever tag you decide to use has a different meaning for everyone who uses it. Listen to serious record collectors or music aficionados talk about music... nobody really talks about genres. They talk about bands and musicians and songs. And many of the relationships between the bands and musicians and songs they're talking about span or confound most notions of "genre." When it comes to products which use music genres, I think they serve best as boot-strapping discovery tools for people who don't know much about music. They're good for the person who comes in saying "I don't know anything about Country music." Having a section that presents some "definitive" (yes scare quotes) Country music might be helpful. As people develop their own tastes, genres become not so useful. I've worked at three different companies, one concert promoter and two streaming music services, where "genre" was deemed to be an important component of the presentation or the product. And 3 out of 3 implementations I've seen only resulted in contention and dissatisfaction. It always came down to one person or small group of people defining categories so hopelessly inadequate that nobody who cared about music was really happy with them. In the end very few customers used features which depended on grouping things by genre, and algorithmic suggestions ended up being much more highly favored. Anyway, my general opinion is "genres suck." I'm glad EchoNest is tackling it dynamically and providing an API for it. Maybe it will improve the experience for products which have focused on the experience of browsing Genres. |
On the other hand, this ingraining of genres is everywhere. Fiction for example. Why are you supposed to be into Fantasy just because you read Tolkien?