Well I for one think Electronic Music has too many sub-genres. Like if you change the timing of the highhat or the type of synth you're using it catapults you into a different genre. Whats that all about? Why does it need to be so segmented?
A big part of what makes music good to dance to (especially when you are going to do it for hours at a time) is its predictability. If you know a beat is about to drop, and you can feel it coming you can position your body in preparation. When it does drop and you are able to move accordingly it provides a great sense of release and satisfaction.
The result of this is that when people go to dance parties, they really want to know in quite some detail about what music it is they are dancing to. So if the genre is slightly changed, it will need a new label to inform the dancers of what is going to be different so they can plan their body movements accordingly! Thus the whole plethora of sub-genres.
But why does it need a label to inform dancers of a genre change? You just feel the beat and move to it, no?
But the music I had in mind, was something like Piniol. A crazy french band, but the genre is hard to describe. I heard it described as Zappamusic (from Frank Zappa), or psychadelic rogressive, but that does not really say much. Also, so far I never liked that music to just put on speakers, just enjoyed them, or similar bands, live in concert.
Oh and, yes their music is also somewhat predictable, it is just that the complexity seems to be higher.
Animals as Leaders, Intervals, Plini, Polyphia etc are all instrumental.
Periphery, Monuments, Tesseract, Dream Theater, Volumes, Born of Osiris, Jason Richardson, The Contortionist etc span a wide variety of sounds, and all implement unique time signatures.
You might wanna check it out if you like wild, unpredictable music.
With dancehall, ragga, etc. this is much harder, yes. "Booolah!!" (something they do in dancehall, a loud sound, breaking the tune and restarting the beat. Breaks groove of dancing by definition)
It's the pretentious of wine culture applied to music basically.
All music eventually starts to sound boring and micro genre is how fans find what they like about genre and continue enjoy it.
I don't understand craft beer fad and obsession, but I know beer has many tastes and many interesting stuff can come out. Why would I call someone pretentious just because they develop something I don't care about.
Drum'n'bass has the same issue... while there are definitely differences between dnb tracks, it's not like you can't play a perfectly great set of dnb with whatever "sub-genres" mixed together. Which in my mind means the notion of the "sub-genres" is BS in the first place.
eg when I discovered from Wikipedia that the genre that Knife Party are in was called "Complextro", I was able to quickly discover other music that I enjoyed from the same genre.
Before I found that magic word, I had no way to find those other acts.
Of course, they're also listed as electro house, drumstep, and dubstep, so clearly they cross sub-genres. Anyway, I did manage to find some other music that I liked so the sub-genre'ing helped me.
Djs don’t buy all one sub genre, generally, but they do tend to focus on a few of them and that’s why the labels and record stores try and cater to what djs are looking for.
People make music first and labels appear after.
An example I like is Witch House. The name was originally conceived as a joke:
"Myself and my friend Shams were joking about the sort of house music we make, [calling it] witch house because it’s, like, occult-based house music. I did this best-of-the-year thing with Pitchfork about witch house. I was saying that we were witch house bands, and 2010 was going to be the year of witch house. It took off from there. But, at the time, when I said witch house, it didn’t even really exist..."
"Shortly after being mentioned to Pitchfork, blogs and other mainstream music press began to use the term. Flavorwire said that despite Egedy's insistence, 'the genre does exist now, for better or worse'."
Say you like a track[1], but one day you stumble upon a remix which makes you go wow. Maybe you really like that aggressive synth and the slightly higher tempo[2], and having a genre just for that makes it easier to find more of it.
Not like electronic music is unique here.
So that when I look at a party in my area I can know if its a party where artists will be playing progressive psytrance or forest psytrance. Because they're different.
Is this so hard to understand for you?
Says who? You can describe your party as psytrance, or just trance if you have to.
I have an event in my facebook feed that just says "hospitalization" and a list of djs. I know what kind of music they will play because I know the organizers and djs, but it would still be helpful to write an bigger description.
You're all stuck on "micro-genres" but when I'm looking at a new dj at some event I expect a full paragraph describing their style with a soundcloud link with some dj sets.
Maybe the fundamental difference is that with a dj or even a producer you can't just download an album and see how they sound: the actual set will probably be unique, and in tune with the party. And yes I do want to know vaguely how it will sound.
Ok, now we're getting somewhere. Thats a very interesting point, thanks.