Dylstew

My take would be that genres catagorize works of entertainment by their similar structural elements, to be used as a general guideline. Indeed, if someone loves let's say a Thrash Metal band, he can find other bands in the genre more easily because of genre's. However, most genres (and by that I mean if I also include outside of music) really do come from the structure and not the meaning. Which means that the general appeal or reason you consume the work in the same genre could be entirely different. The genre says about what it has, not how it approached said thing.

Neon Genesis Evangelion is a Mecha anime because it has giant robots (well, ''Robots'') battling. Gurren lagan is a Mecha for the same reason. However, these 2 most popular Mecha under the same teenage demographic couldn't be more of an opposite from eachother in tone and appeal. One is anti escapism, the other revels in it. One's tone is quite depressing despite the optinistic message, while the other is completely over the top fun. One is about characters and their flaws, while the other is about rediculous action.

Another example, both Metroid Prime and Call of Duty are first person shooters as they're in first person and there's plenty of shooting. However, Metroid Prime is more of an action adventure game that they switched into first person, and thus has an entirely different audience/appeal.

This means that genre's have the benefit of introducing you to familiar yet potentially different things. Another benefit is not actually trying to find similar stuff, but how if you feel like you've had enough of a certain style, you can just look up other ones. You can easily introduce yourself to a very diverse set of bands at your own pace by just getting into another genre. instead of just listening to random bands can choose to find 5 of the best bands of each given style instead.

The downside is that things with different appeals get put together, and you might recieve constant reccomendations you don't like. Such as a Super Metroid fan getting reccomended Castlevania Symphony of the Night. One is built around exploration and the other just uses exploration to serve it's focus: action.

While like 90% of works are dereviative and actually quite easy to catagorize, the problem is there will always be these bands hard to classify. It can also get difficult when lots of genres mix and overlap, or when people make genres that are either overly specific, or way too vague (both are rather useless) Then there''s the problem of people who instead of taking them as a general guideline take them waaaaay too seriously, worryng over the label more than the music.

But all in all, I'd say sub genres have done way more good for my music listening (and learning about different kinds of music) than if we wouldn't have them.

Hmm..I think I could turn this topic into a little video.