A good definition of the term “Music Genre”

A music genre is a category (or genre) of pieces of music that share a certain style or “basic musical language” (van der Merwe 1989, p.3). Music may also be categorised by non-musical criteria such as geographical origin though a single geographical category will often include a wide variety of sub-genres

The article explains the different attributes that make up a music genre.  The post continues to explain the subjectivity in separating music into genres.  Finally, the article also explains the necessity by some organizations, such as record labels, to cluster music into genres.

Read the complete article here.

musicgenretree.com update

After finding a suitable home/host/server for musicgenretree.com, I am ready to offer a sneak peek at the very first incarnations of the site.  Send me a note if you would like an invitation.

These first few versions of the application will simply offer the ability to traverse the genre tree.  In a few months, I will add the ability to get information on each genre and possibly add a community around the site.

One of the reasons I am offering an advanced sneak-peek is to get feedback regarding the overall look-and-feel and to get suggestions on the genre tree itself.

soundunwound: good for artist information, that’s about it.

soundunwound is a new Amazon.com music site that has been curated with information from Amazon’s own music database, imdb, and musicbrainz.  This is a great site to find all the information you need on a certain musical artist.  Soundwound is artist-focused, not enough emphasis is placed on genres.

Genres appear on each artist’s page to describe them.  This site breaks down the genres in three levels (mainly, quite, hints of), as you will see in the following screenshot for Calexico.

clicking on a genre takes you to a description and top artists on that genre.  These are a few criticisms that I have come up with after playing around for a while:

• there is not one page where we can take a look at all the genres together in an organized fashion.  It seems that the only way to get to a genre page is to search for an artist, then click on a genre describing that genre.
• many of the genres seem to have no descriptions.  Really ? how much would it have cost Amazon to pay somebody to simply copy-n-paste from wikipedia ? It seems that the information for the populated genres has been retrieved from wikipedia – so why not complete them all, or most of ‘em ?

For finding artist information this site has potential – maybe even calling it the imdb for music.  However as a site for finding information about genres and discovering music based on genres it lacks some points.

3 Minute Documentary about Ugandan Hip-Hop

Wikipedia has a run-down on all the different styles of African Hip-Hop.

Electronic Music Genre Tree

Over at techno.org, you can find a well-constructed Electronic music genre tree.  The authors claim to “entertain before it informs”, which is how we should really treat any music genre tree.  As I have mentioned in the past, music genres are one of the most subjective topics, therefore all music genre trees should be taken with a grain of salt.  The tutorial found in this site is a good explanation on electronic music, in general.  Have fun there.

Barack Obama now has a Cumbia

Music Genre Related Links

While researching several sources for building up the initial phases of the music genre tree, I have found several good sources that I plan to reference.  These are a few of the most interesting sites in no particular order:

• Rate Your Music: A Social network revolving around music.  I haven’t tried their core site, but their genre tree is public and quite good.
• Wikipedia’s Representation of a Complete Music Genre Tree: Not the greatest user interface for looking at this data, but very complete and accurate.
• Wikipedia’s Geneology of Cuban Music: Shows a subset of the complete music genre tree.  It is just interesting to see how you can represent genres while taking in consideration region and period of time.
• A Taxonomy of Music Genres: A research paper presented at Content-Based Multimedia Information Access Conference in April 2000.  A great, and educational, read for anybody interested in music genres.
• last.fm’s genre-related tags: Paul Lamere, a music researcher at Sun Labs has compiled a clickable list of genres generated from tags given to songs on the last.fm web site.
• . . . and finally, a comedic and educational video on music genres by benpatton.com:

Aurgasm – free and legal mp3s

One of the sites on my rss feed is http://aurgasm.us/.  Each week, or so, they feature a new artist and a few mp3s by that artist.  Recently, they featured a great female vocalist: Melody Gardot.  Finding out about her made following this website worthwhile.  I just listened to her two songs offered by this post: Goodnite and Worrisome Heart.  Now, I must get all her songs.

Take a Glimpse at Upcoming CD Releases

A list that I view every few months is the upcoming CD releases to see what’s coming down the album pipe.

Personally, I’m most looking forward for Dr. Dre’s Detox, which is set to release sometime this year.  Detox should be Dr. Dre’s final album and one that will step aside from the norm.  In a 2002 interview with MTV, Dre stated:

“I’m not talking about lowriders and blunts and all that anymore,  I mean, that’s played. As a matter of fact, I’m tired of hearing other people talk about it, to tell you the truth.  I had to come up with something different but still keep it hardcore, so what I decided to do was make my album one story about one person and just do the record through a character’s eyes,  And everybody that appears on my album is going to be a character, so it’s basically going to be a hip-hop musical.”

Don’t know if this is officially from Dr. Dre, but here’s a teaser video promoting the album:

Top 45 Music Websites that Deliver Free Music

webupon.com just compiled the Top 45 Music Websites that deliver free music.  Some sites offer stritcly streaming music some offer downloads.  Check it out.