In the 90's, I was into Breakbeat Hardcore and then later Jungle, which transformed into Drum & Bass, which was subdivided over time into Ragga, Neurofunk, Tech Step, Hard Step, Jump-Up, Clown Step, Liquid Funk, Ambient Drum & Bass, Drumstep and so on.

Of course, what I understand under "Drum & Bass" is very different from a 18 year-old teenager who thinks late-period Pendulum is the greatest thing on earth.

Now, during the early 00's a lot of the old-schoolers were annoyed with the direction drum and bass took. The tracks became cheesier and cheesier, and a lot of the old vibe was gone.

They turned to Garage, Grime and Breaks and found a fertile playing ground in the fledgling Dubstep scene. Lo' and behold, there it was, the fat dubby bass of their youth.

Alas, again, an 18-year old teenager today has a very different picture of "Dubstep" compared to that of the people who originated the sound. No more dub, a lot of cheese. Somewhat similar to the entire drum and bass story. The genre has been appropriated by the masses.

And well, the circle goes on and on. The same thing applies to older genres such as "Electro", which in the 80's meant something entirely different from what it is now.

So in a sense, how useful are genres really?

Making genres more specific and granular just makes categorization more confusing and contentious. But use of multiple tags to categorize a song could allow different people to simultaneously apply the labels they prefer.

Or perhaps a better solution would be "x sounds like y, z, etc."

Genres are deeply ingrained in people's heads, but they're a vestige from record stores and radio stations with limited playlists targeted at specific mass-market demographic points. The more you listen and explore on your own, the less meaningful they are.

Sure, people say things like, "well I'm listening to a lot of jazz these days." They might even specify "bebop." But those tags are only slightly meaningful, and as others have illustrated in the comments, it's still limited and misleading. And whatever tag you decide to use has a different meaning for everyone who uses it.

Listen to serious record collectors or music aficionados talk about music... nobody really talks about genres. They talk about bands and musicians and songs. And many of the relationships between the bands and musicians and songs they're talking about span or confound most notions of "genre."

When it comes to products which use music genres, I think they serve best as boot-strapping discovery tools for people who don't know much about music. They're good for the person who comes in saying "I don't know anything about Country music." Having a section that presents some "definitive" (yes scare quotes) Country music might be helpful. As people develop their own tastes, genres become not so useful.

I've worked at three different companies, one concert promoter and two streaming music services, where "genre" was deemed to be an important component of the presentation or the product. And 3 out of 3 implementations I've seen only resulted in contention and dissatisfaction. It always came down to one person or small group of people defining categories so hopelessly inadequate that nobody who cared about music was really happy with them. In the end very few customers used features which depended on grouping things by genre, and algorithmic suggestions ended up being much more highly favored.

Anyway, my general opinion is "genres suck." I'm glad EchoNest is tackling it dynamically and providing an API for it. Maybe it will improve the experience for products which have focused on the experience of browsing Genres.

discogs.com is a much better resource for the music taxonomist.

This would make the 'random' mode function better, so that when I'm listening to relaxing music in the evening and get served bass music, skipping it makes that less likely to happen in the future. The player itself doesn't know what 'genres' are, though it knows albums, artists, and playlists.

It's funny to see how different things are today. The gray areas are much grayer.

[0]: http://techno.org/electronic-music-guide/

I listen to video game music quite a bit (some sub-genres more than others), but you can find pretty much every genre listed here in at least one video game.

Sure, there may be a few video games that feature music that doesn't fall into any other "genre", but if somebody told me to describe what video game music sounded like, I couldn't do it, like I could with most other genres.

I don't really care, I know this is just someone's interpretation of a genre. I just found it interesting and thought it was worth mentioning.

As a part of the application, I also built a D3 visualization quite similar to the one in this article for the tastes of the individuals and the tastes of the location.

It's amazing how much you can learn about a person's taste, given the combination of their genre tastes. <hipsterbash> For instance, you can safely assume that if the person likes hipster-electro-pop, their love for old western twang country might be out of irony. </hipsterbash>

This visualisation is way cooler than my side menu though :).

I see tags are mentioned in the discussion here. Tags/keywords are great for power users, but most people just don't think "I want to listen to X and Y without Z". They just think "I want to listen to Electrohouse" etc.

Can anyone find a flat list of all the genres?

Very much so; I've lost count of the number of times I've wished that players would recognize more than one genre tag; heck, even allmusic.com had multiple "styles" for their listings.

Of course, the real problem is human language, it's subtleties, and how people (ab)use it.

If by tags, you mean user-driven categorization by arbitrary text, that's an even harder problem. Tags can be spelled differently and mean the same thing. Or they can be spelled the same and mean completely different things. What you mean by "punk" and what I mean by "punk" are different. Possibly radically different. If tags are to be useful at all, you still need one authority who decides specifically what each tag means.

The problem isn't with genres, it's with trying to put bands in them.

Take a look at some of the weird tags you can find on Last.fm. It's valuable, but different than "categorization." It's more like "relationship."