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Music Classification

An overview of how I classify my music collection

Jon Tillman | Filed Under: Music | Tagged:
First Published: 2025-02-05| Last Updated: 2024-04-10
Status: finished(?)| Audience: nerds who love filing| Confidence: aficionado

This is my mostly complete, probably unnecessarily complex, system for classifying and filing music in my ever-growing collection.

I like music. A lot. I pretty much have music playing for almost all of my waking hours. In addition, my musical tastes range widely (regardless of what the music section of this website would lead you to believe). In order to account for the enormous diversity of my collection, I have endeavored to build a system that will allow classification of any piece of music with more or less specificity as is needed for any particular purpose. The system consists of a main classification scheme of five layers, each layer becoming more granular than the preceding. Let’s look at each one in turn.

Grouping

This is the most basic division of music into general types, and is the one that musicologists use to divide music into broad categories.

See Music Groupings for more information.

Genre Category

Essentially, this classification level exists to provide some initial sorting, and to allow for a more regional and inclusive breakdown of music from around the world.

See Genre Categories for more information.

Genre

Here we get into the real meat of the system. In broadest terms, a genre is a way to sort music by similar form, style, and (sometimes) origin. Ideally, defining a genre for a piece of art comes as a result of analyzing the most distinctive elements of that piece of art.

See Music Genres for more information.

Sub-Genre

Sub-genres are subordinate divisions of a genre that allow more fine-grained differentiation between groups of musical acts. I think of them (and use them) to denote minor stylistic and tonal/mood differences between albums within a defined genre. For instance, I consider all metal music to be a sub-genre of rock, because it shares all of the forms and techniques of rock music, but with very obvious differences in valence and focus.

See Sub Genres for more information.

Style

Two kinds of information can be contained in this field. Either a standard stylistic modifier for the preceding categories, taken from the below list, or a micro-genre. Micro-genres are most noticeable in the Electronic and Metal sub-genres, and represent (usually) brief artistic or stylistic movements within a genre or sub-genre.

Standard sub-style markers are things like:

  • Ambient
  • Concept Album
  • Experimental
  • Jam
  • Political
  • Progressive
  • Raw
  • Singer/Songwriter
  • Symphonic

See Music Styles for more information.