The word "genre" has basically come to mean "description key words." These key words can be linked together into arbitrarily long chains, and they're varyingly meaningful to people.

Since Elvis, Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly and doowop, "rock" music has diversified constantly over the years. The more diversification, the less that broad genres fit individual bands. You can use these descriptor chains to drill down as far as you want...down to the individual artist level, or even down to the album level within an artist's catalogue (are all Bowie albums in the same genre? If so, which?).

I think the concept of "official genres" is definitely way out of date. Essentially, genres are simply another form of expression and opinion. If a band sounds to you like electronic dream beach foam pop, well, that's meaningful to you. Maybe it'll be meaningful to someone else, maybe not. Maybe all they'll get out of it is that it's pop.

do you really expect better from HMV?

Genres are important in order to give a person an idea of the sound of the music easily.


and while I agree that there are a few genres in Metal that are meaningless, most are actually real genres with their own distinct sound.

sub genres is where it gets absurd. The farthest I take it is combining two major genres like blues-rock, soul-funk etc.

Metal is the biggest perpetrator, it should all be called metal.

You could give every band their own genre is look critically enough at their musical range. But would anyone be surprised to find Norwegian doom scream-o surprise music in the metal section of your local record store.

I think we could get by with Jazz, Country, Rock, Pop, Hip-Hop and R&B

I love going to places like allmusic and seeing the vast array of sub-genres they have come up with. The amount of them are almost rediculous.

obviously you do not listen to that much metal.

But allmusic has pretty decent, credible descriptions of each. And I find them quite useful to find other bands with a very specific sound. They are certainly subjective, but if I like a certain band, whatever allmusic calls it, I can use that highly specific genre to find more bands that have very similar elements (like, say, jangly guitars) that more "agreed upon" genres like "pop," "rock," "metal" wouldn't preserve, informationally.

Oh I wasn't complaining. You are right, if you are looking for a certain sound and don't want to go through heeps of artists at aren't related at all, allmusic is the place to go. I'm just saying they really peck at the key genres until there is almost nothing left.

Yeah, very true. And have you looked at the "moods" for bands? Pretty insane. allmusic has taken description keywords to quite another level.

No kidding. It's almost meaningless, especially when you have something really diverse and 'quirky' and 'brooding' are tagged for the same album :laughing: