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Comment by breadbox | Hacker News Reader

Oh look, yet another music classification system that lists twelve different genres of music invented after the CD player but has one genre labelled "Classical" to cover several centuries of wildly varying musical styles.

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Imagine how international listeners feel about music classification systems (nearly every one out there) that clump all international music into 'World Music'. Just looking at Indian music, there's probably a few dozen high level categories you can create for completely different genres of music.

North Indian, South Indian, Hindustani, Carnatic, Film music from maybe a dozen different languages that are wildly different, qawwalis, ghazals, Rabindra Sangeet, music from different periods of Indian cinema... I could go on... sigh.

Are there no Indian music services that do a better job?

There's Saavn, but it does a mediocre job IMO.

http://www.saavn.com/

I wonder if they are even legal.

And why would you wonder so? Some insight please.

Creative industry in Asian country are highly disorganized. For India, one of the best possible way to watch any new content if either in movie theaters or live on television. Internet sucks and cable companies suck too that makes it pretty hard for folks to get content they actually want to watch. Tech savvy folks go for torrents and less techy folks buy pirated content from street vendors.

Insight is they are based off NY which makes they impervious to Indian laws. And personally, I haven't come across any good Indian website that gives you impression that you are buying legal content.

Didn't you hear what the king told the boogie men?

"You got to let that raga drop"

Half of the time it doesn't even work.

Ever considered that it might be listener-driven?

It's self-fulfilling. I was a potential listener that was driven away.

1. That doesn't seem to be actually true - I see three categories associated with Classical in the listing on Songza.com under Genres 2. Songza, in general, isn't so much about browsing narrowly-defined genre categories. You'd be more likely to find specific time periods or styles represented as Channels under Classical than as their own sub-categories.

Check out everynoise:

http://everynoise.com/engenremap.html

(look at the bottom of the cloud)

Some exposition here:

http://www.furia.com/page.cgi?type=log&id=392

and in other posts there.

That's an interesting visualization, but the concept isn't even remotely usable for a consumer-facing music product.

Perhaps the market for Classical music isn't big? NBD to me...

Is that necessarily that bad? I bet there is a heck of a lot more published recorded music after the CD player than before. If you weight by listens per day, I suspect that would be even more so.

That's why there are channels, that are just very broadly sorted into genres to start.

What are you suggesting as an alternative classification system?

Well, to a classical music afficionado, you might have "Gregorian, Rennaissance, Baroque, Classical, Romantic, Avant Garde, Contemporary, New Age, Popular". Even this is biased toward recency, and reflects my own lack of knowledge of pre-baroque music.

Or you could slice it by form: "Hymns, Choirs, Quartets, Symphonies, Concertos, Sonatas, Operas, Ballets, Rondos, Minuets, Gavottes, Chaconnes, Themes & variations, Musicals, Film scores, Popular & rock music."

Or by instrument: "Harpsichord, Piano, harp, Violin, Viola, Cello, Flute, Oboe, Clarinet, French Horn, Bassoon, Trumpet, Trombone, Tuba, Guitar, Percussion, Electric Instruments".

I think the general point is that categories depend upon the listener. You can't impose a categorization on data without understanding who the audience is and what their mental model of the field is. And the more expertise you gain in a field, the deeper your categorization gets.

> Even this is biased toward recency, and reflects my own lack of knowledge of pre-baroque music.

This is random, but one of the things I love about Civilization IV is that when you enter a new era, it plays music from that era, to really give you the sense of moving through time.

Except that when you enter the "Medieval" era, it plays this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7g7jOKLUus8

A brilliant piece of music, and a great credit to them that they would have chosen this piece and this recording of it. An absolute masterpiece. Of the High Renaissance, that is. Sheppard was born c. 1515, and the Renaissance in music is usually dated to begin somewhere around 1400.

I guess I'm saying you're not the only one. :)

> Well, to a classical music afficionado, you might have "Gregorian, Rennaissance, Baroque, Classical, Romantic, Avant Garde, Contemporary, New Age, Popular".

You're just complaining then about what the top-level nodes are on the classification tree of music genres. If you have Classical with Gregorian as a sub-genre that's the same thing as having Gregorian as a top-level genre. Same with OP's problem with "World Music" genre (except for the culturally insulting aspect of it).

The only time it could possibly matter is if the system doesn't have sub-genres... but that would be a pretty ridiculous system.

Really genres suck for a different reason, because they are vague and overlapping and subjective. What I want is a composable classification system with actual objective traits about the music... so I can say "female lead singer, german language, trumpets, beats-per-minute 80-120" and so forth. I don't know if such music exists, but I would listen to it if I could find it.

edit: didn't realize the Songza doesn't have any sub-genres of Classical, so include it as a "pretty ridiculous system".

Pandora has that on the backend - they will tell you why they recommended a song, and it's often things like "female lead singer, heavy metal beat, fast tempo". I don't think they manually let you enter in values for the different dimensions in their database to search, though.

I don't think there's anything wrong with that sort of detailed classification, but I think it's simply out of scope for a consumer-facing music product.

I think he means that there should be a sublist for classical music. See the table to the right: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_music#History

I see over a dozen channels dedicated to classical music.

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