Organising your music collection

[Solvent]

OK, so I’m a bit of a dinosaur. I have progressed to mostly collecting new music in digital form now, but I still have a CD collection (which you’ll need to pry from my cold dead fingers). I recently did a big move, and my CD collection is boxed up. I’m shopping for a storage solution which will likely be a shelf.

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

As you might be able to tell this question is not only to help me consider my problem, but also because I’m curious about the tastes of forumers. Share your weird tastes!

*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.

[Jason]

Like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXjCtgiUEu8

[7Wannabe5]

I accidentally left the last of my CD collection in my last car which I gave to my daughter a few years ago. Her BF "borrowed" it, and I haven't seen it since. Left to my own devices, I have crap taste in music, but I have always had some musicians in my social circle who influenced my collection towards quality/novelty. I would be more likely to creatively apply an exercise such as you are suggesting to my library or reading lists. That said, I think I would tend towards either chronological/era categories or emotional-state-or-desired-effect categories. I guess if I combined these, I might come up with a list inclusive of labels such as Meditative-Stoned/70s, Power-Sexy/90s, Cheerful-Side-Of-Blue/20s...

[Riggerjack]

I organize my tunes based on tasks. I have county, for when I'm working, grunge for when I'm working, but with no production in mind (hobbies, or equipment maintenance) classical for winding down, instrumentals for quiet contemplating, and of course Pink Floyd, for everything.

[anomie]

This is not what you are asking but ...

I spent 2 days uploading my 15,000 mp3s to Google Play Music, just to find that I never even listened to them. Google makes their whole library available, makes it to easy to listen to any music I can dream of ...

... sigh ... kids these days will never appreciate a good DVD collection in the face of streaming music... (joke, I love Google Play Music)