How do you classify music into genres?

[kitkat]

How do you classify music into genres?

[J.D.]

Genres are pretty much entirely made up, and tend to change over time. They're like tagging on flickr or myweb, before the tagging concept became popular.As a DJ, my own thought process tends to be that I'll see words in reviews, and often (though not always) eventually come to understand what the reviewers are trying to say with those words. If I like the music associated with those words, I can have some minor expectation that I might enjoy other music with similar words.Unfortunately, this has led me to purchase some really awful stuff -- for example, one reviewer I used to like a lot used the term "electrofunk" to refer to music that wasn't any of the three or four things called "electro," and wasn't funky.

vagabondage.com

[Lester Mannix]

You group like with like. Easy, eh? Now how you do that is where the talent comes in. Record stores like to do it by the person performing the music. That fails when the person decides to play something in a different style than they usually do (e.g., Paul McCartney). So, the only good way to do this, that won't fail or change over time, is to group music by it's own internal characteristics ... just as we group biological organisms by their DNA. The many, many characteristics of even one bit of music make this a tough task. Do you group all music in 3/4 time together? No. All music without words? All music with drums? All music in an A-B-A form, all music in D major??? See how hard it is!Another way that doesn't work well, but that people try to use is to group music by time period. Music from the 1950s, 1700s, 1990s, etc. Just look around at the awesome variety of types of music being created today, and you'll realize that this classification scheme won't work either.So, in the end, the best method is to use the music's own characteristics, but in more than one dimension. That is, where you may have more than one bit of music in 3/4, you need to also look at their harmony, instrumentation, form, rhythms, scale, melody, words (if any) and so on. Music where all of those things are similar should be grouped together... and maybe, if there are enough, they could constitute a "genre."Good luck!

[sexy_pimp50]

downloads it

[cobwildchildhc]

Maybe this will help...

en.wikipedia.org