Genres

[Sydian]

I've been thinking about this a lot lately. There are a TON of different genres of music. What defines certain music genres? There are more obvious genres, like Pop, Rap, Rock, and Dubstep which I think are more easily classified, however what about the more obscure genres? What makes something Psychill, Progressive, Chillwave, or Indie? And does having your music in the "mainstream" take it out of a certain genre? The biggest culprit of that, imo, would be Indie music. And do artists change their genres over time? Are musical genres even real? Are we just making more and more up so that artists can seem more different?

You don't have to answer those questions specifically, but just toss in your opinions on genres in general. I'll answer later when I can think, haha.

[Scarf]

I just gotta say I hate when I put music on my computer it has a space to fill in the genre and I never know what to do with it. Like 80% of my music is just "Rock/Pop" because I couldn't be bothered to find out exactly what it is.

Yeah, they're real, but if you don't know enough about music they aren't any use. I mean, they're supposed to be a way of categorizing music, but to me they feel more like descriptions, like I have music I think is kind of "pop" or whatever and it may in fact fall under something entirely different, or some more specific subgenre.

[PersianTrainer]

I agree, there lots of genres, and whit in that 'main' genre there are dozens of sub-genres. It can get very confusing.

On my computer, when I get information from the internet it always give the genre simply as 'Rock' and I have to edit each song or album individually to the right sub genre.

For the style of music I listen to the main genre is "Metal", but there are dozens and dozens of sub genres (for example - death metal, thrash metal, black metal, Norwegian black metal, British metal, Power Metal, nu metal). I heard from a documentary [Metal: A Headbanger's Journey] that each individual sub genre has its own sounds, content of lyrics, the way the song is played I mean by vocals.

I noticed that people who don't like the kind of music I do [by genre in this case] just call it 'Metal' or 'Heavy Metal' they tell me that it just sounds the same, but for a fan like myself I can easily hear the differences. Well thats my opinion

[Plumpyfoof]

Originally Posted by PersianTrainer

[Metal: A Headbanger's Journey] that each individual sub genre has its own sounds, content of lyrics, the way the song is played I mean by vocals.

I noticed that people who don't like the kind of music I do [by genre in this case] just call it 'Metal' or 'Heavy Metal' they tell me that it just sounds the same, but for a fan like myself I can easily hear the differences. Well thats my opinion

First up, such a good movie!
Next I completely agree with you. I've been studying music for most of my life and will be going on to study Sound next year and as such I've developed an aptitude for identifying the different sounds within everything including music.
I think the people you are describing are very closed minded, musically. In fact I'm sure if you put on two different songs of different sub-genres within their favourite genre they'd be ably to tell you the difference between them.
Think about it, you can't make claims if you're not properly educated right?

My point here is that every genre within a genre within a genre has its slight differences which is what prompted the creation of the genre.


Oh just one thing about Indie music is that when an Indie band gets ore popular and signs a record deal at that point they are no longer Indie.
Indie = Independent. You can't be independent if you depend on a company to put your music out.

[Rococo]

A very wise man once said:
"There are only two kinds of music,the good kind and the bad kind,you decide which is which."
That's the way I see it as well.

[droomph]

Uh, yeah. I just go with whatever they say, but if it's really random (eg "146") I'll just change it to whatever (in this case, J-Pop).

And honestly though, there's two types of music for me, good and bad. It's really fluid as I'm a music guy in nature, so I just listen to music, rather than any certain type, so I couldn't be bothered to care if it's not ridiculously weird.

[Katalyst]

When there are similarities about the music some bands play, they are grouped into a new genre. Which is why some bands are hard to categorize - they're different from everything else there has ever been. Nevermore, for example.

Some bands do different stuff over time, for various reasons - to make money, to have different kinds of compositions, or because they have a wide range of music tastes (Metallica and Megadeth, for example, although they did it in different ways and not really at the same time - and for different reasons).
In some of these genres, you can't just stick by the main genre such as Rock or Metal - there are many different kinds of Metal, the differences between Heavy, Thrash, Death and Black Metal, for instance, are more than obvious and these can't be thrown in the same bag.

I tend to stick to some genres because if I know the traits of these genres I will know the music I like or not whenever something new comes across.

[Eeveon]

Originally Posted by Katalyst

When there are similarities about the music some bands play, they are grouped into a new genre. Which is why some bands are hard to categorize - they're different from everything else there has ever been. Nevermore, for example.

Some bands do different stuff over time, for various reasons - to make money, to have different kinds of compositions, or because they have a wide range of music tastes (Metallica and Megadeth, for example, although they did it in different ways and not really at the same time - and for different reasons).
In some of these genres, you can't just stick by the main genre such as Rock or Metal - there are many different kinds of Metal, the differences between Heavy, Thrash, Death and Black Metal, for instance, are more than obvious and these can't be thrown in the same bag.

I tend to stick to some genres because if I know the traits of these genres I will know the music I like or not whenever something new comes across.

There's constantly arguments over what type of genre some metal bands are, and it's ridiculous. I'm terrible at labeling genre's at some bands, but I usually know the obvious ones. Such as Whitechapel is deathcore or I, The Breather is metalcore. But there's tons of other crazy sub-genres too, now. Like, the guitar tone "djent" is apparently a genre now, since a lot of bands are starting to use that. Or melodic death metal. Technical death metal. I guess some are easy to label if you listen to those genres enough, but then even more sub-genres come out and I think, "Can't we just stick with the ones we have now?"