I’m looking forward to arranging my collection, and I think this time I’ll do it by genre.* Here is your hypothetical:
If you were to arrange your music collection by genre, which category labels would you use?
The problem I’m angling at is how deep would you go defining subgenres? I’d rather only have to worry about probably 6-8 labels, maybe 10 at max. But your solution will be personal to you, and will depend on the diversity of your taste and extensiveness of your collection.
Please avoid the answer “All my music is digital, the genre comes from an internet database and I don’t have to worry about it because my media player organizes it.” Do a thought experiment. Imagine placing physical media on a shelf, how many layers deep would you go in labelling genres/subgenres?
As a start, I’m thinking of creating the following ‘buckets’:
- Jazz/Avant Garde
- Rock/Pop/Heavy
- Alternative/Indie/Grunge (for me, this will have by far the most discs)
- Rap/Hip Hop
- Classical
- Dance/Dub/Electronic
*Back when my collection was considerably smaller, I actually arranged my music geographically (that is, country of origin (in alphabetical order), and often with cities grouped together – so all the Sydney bands together, all Brisbane, all Seattle, etc.).
When this got to be a bit too much I switched to chronological.