Gavin B.

If you read my post carefully I think we're both saying the same thing. I completely agree that it's appropriate to have country music in the same forum as folk music but other forms of unique roots music like rural blues (pre-WWII folk blues), bluegrass, Celtic music and other regional music should be included. I'm actually arguing that the genre content of this forum be expanded.

You're right, international music is really the odd genre out in this forum. And we both agree that it could be remedied by merging it with the reggae music forum. I don't think reggae music should be moved into folk/country/international forum, however. It would be a lose/lose situation. Adding reggae music to the mix would really confuse readers about the nature of the country/folk/international forum.

As it currently stands the country, folk and international forum has become a catch-all forum for musical forms that aren't that popular with the masses... or at least the masses who participate in music forums. If I ran the zoo, there would be a single forum titled "Reggae and International Music."

The total sales of country music (55.8 million units in 2012) makes it the fourth most popular musical genre in the world but apparently country music fans don't participate in music forums. In fact country music sales were up 42% in 2012 compared to 2011 sales figures. That makes country music that fastest growing genre of music in the world... if you measure success purely on economic terms. Apparently few of those devotees of country music have found the Music Banter forum. Maybe country music fans don't read or write about the music they love.

It would be easy enough for me to post my proposed Outernational music thread in the Member's Journal fourm of the MB Reader section, and reach a much larger readership there. There's nothing wrong with me wanting to post a thread in the forum that receives the most number of views by MB members... but I currently have misgivings about starting a second journal in MB Reader section, especially since there's a avid competition for readership in the Members Journal forum which I'm reluctant to participate in.

My proposals were ideas to increase the readership of one of the lesser trafficked forums at Music Banter. Yes, you are being prickly but so am I. Neither of us should have to apologize for having passionate ideas on how to increase readership in the Music Banter forum.

I really do believe that each forum can be packaged in a manner that increases readership and a lot of it has to do with the stylistic presentation of each forum, not the content.

I'm going to go ahead and start my Outernational thread in this forum but I think it's out of place in a forum that includes country music and folk music.

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There are two types of music: the first type is the blues and the second type is all the other stuff.
Townes Van Zandt

Urban Hat€monger ?

I'm still not entirely sure where you're getting this idea that international music & reggae are similar things. I mean what have dancehall or dub & scottish bagpipe music got in common?

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Lisnaholic

Thanks for the detailed reply to the points that I raised, Gavin B - sorry if I misunderstood some bits of your previous post.

^ Good to know that we´re on the same page after all, and in fact, if you dip into some of the threads here, you´ll see that bluegrass, Celtic and rural blues are already represented here - along with a zillion other sub-genres.

^ Didn´t entirely follow that bit, so I´m going to re-read it later.

^ I had no idea that country music was so popular.Thanks for the stats.

^ My understanding is that the style of an MB forum is dictated by the famously inflexible admin, and all we get to do is add our little bits of content, but perhaps you mean something else.
^ Well, that´s great news! I look forward to learning what Outernational music actually is.

^ I´m quite happy with the way the forums are split at the moment, Urban. I guess I was just trying to rationalize why various types of music are bundled together and put in the "Country, Folk and World" section. In the absence of any clear definition, I came up with this:-
By that criteria, ska and reggae - like Scottish bagpipe music - have strong regional elements as far as I know, and so, logically, could be considered as belonging in the "world music" forum. That they sound completely unlike each other is a point that somebody else highlighted when they asked, "Why are Tibetan and Brazilian music grouped together?"

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"Am I enjoying this moment? I know of it and perhaps that is enough." - Sybille Bedford, 1953

Urban Hat€monger ?

I get that, but my point is if you think (Not you personally) that the categories are not good enough what's the point of moving it to another that doesn't fit either.

And you are right, Reggae & Ska is a regional form of music that could come under that too, however there something you need to take into account.....

The last time we had a forum shuffle around we needed to merge the 3 lowest traffic forums together to get the forum the way we wanted it, had we needed to merge the lowest 4 forums instead Reggae would have been included in it too. As it happened we didn't need to and it was allowed to stay as a separate forum.

All genres bleed into each other so you have to draw the line somewhere before things look silly. I'd rather have less forums that are active than have the car crash that is that other music forum that regularly rips our ideas off us where they have about 40 separate forums for every little thing that hardly anybody posts in.

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Lisnaholic

^ That´s an interesting bit of MB history, and I´m sure most of us are happy to leave the forums the way the mods put them.

^ I don´t really browse in other forums, but you´re quite right, that sounds like a disaster of endlessly having to define genres that, as you say, run together anyway. It must be like taking a mug of coffee and trying to separate out the water from the milk and the sugar.

None the less, while this thread is on the topic of terms and genres, I´d like to make a couple of points that may only appeal to the pedantic among us, so read on at your peril:-

1:-
^ They´re not totally different at all; country is just one type of world music.

2:-
I really like Neapolitan, so I feel guilty to be nit-picking his answer to the question, "What is world music?", especially as I am making up my definitions as I go along too.

To me, a more useful answer is that world music is music that may come from anywhere in the world and still retains some evidence of its ethnic origin.

3:-
People seem to use the words "international" and "world" as if they are interchangeable, but I think there´s a distinction to be made.
International is something that occurs across many nations; MB is an international forum, the same way the binary number system is international; it´s the same everywhere and it´s not immediately obvious where it originated from.
These days a piece of music like this can be accessed internationally, but it´s not international music; it clearly comes from Africa and is an example of world music:-


Well, those are my ideas anyway. Don´t know if they are of interest, or make sense to anyone else ....

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"Am I enjoying this moment? I know of it and perhaps that is enough." - Sybille Bedford, 1953

Gavin B.

World music is entirely a matter of relativity. I once went into a record store in Hong Kong and asked the clerk where the Grateful Dead albums were. He looked at me like I was clueless because I didn't know the Dead were in the International Music section.

__________________
There are two types of music: the first type is the blues and the second type is all the other stuff.
Townes Van Zandt

Mr. Charlie

It's music from Mars, innit, you silly billy. I think. I dunno. How's the weather there?