Forum: musicfans.stackexchange.com
Tags: <genre>
Title: What's the purpose of having so many subgenres of music?
Question: I am quite aware that there are more than a thousand subgenres for music. So what is the use for them?  Who needs them and why?

Answers:
sents: text: No-one needs them.
text: It's man's proclivity for pigeon-holing, which in recent years - & given so little movement in popular music in the past couple of decades - has seen rise to finer & finer delineations between genres that really anyone could just lump in together.
text: If it continues, we'll end up with just one pigeon per hole, rendering the entire exercise more obviously pointless than it is at present.
text: BTW, this question is entirely opinion-based, but I just thought I'd get my opinion in first
text: ;-)
answer_details: author: musicfans.stackexchange.com/users/84/Tetsujin
score: 7
sents: text: The sub-genres exist because someone wanted them to exist.
text: This is really a specific case of a much more general question of why people put things in categories in the first place.
text: It's a deeply rooted human trait, with applications far beyond just music theory.
text: We have genres because we like to be able to capture complex things in a small number of words.
text: When we are told "Hey, you should go listen to band XYZ," actually taking the time to go listen to them can be very, well, time consuming.
text: If we value our time, we want to get some sense of what we're about to get into, so we ask "what genre of music do they play?"
text: We can then file the recommendation to listen to the band alongside that one or two word genre, permitting us to prioritize.
text: I'm not about to waste my time listening to some new orchestral piece when my house is noisy.
text: I'll save that for when the house is quiet and I can appreciate it properly.
text: Likewise, the latest thrash metal is probably not what I should listen to right before my wife and I go off for a romantic dinner.
text: The raw number of categories we create is a side effect of this process.
text: Some people feel their music is too "out there" to fit into an existing genre, so they seek to define their own new genre.
text: Other times it works the opposite way: someone wants to call their work as part of a genre, but the music snobs refuse to let them.
text: We also see more genres form when people want different types of categorization.
text: To pick a trivial example, if I like music with a fast tempo rather than slow, and you like music with a full orchestra rather than just a few instruments, neither one of our categorizations is complete.
text: We need something more, like "fast orchestral music," and thus a new genre is born.
text: Genres live and die constantly.
text: They're fickle things which float on the backs of our own obsessions with categorization.
text: The reason there are so many subgenres of music is because there are so many people out there actively keeping those sub-genres alive.
text: An interesting comparason can be made in the movie industry.
text: Netflix famously handed out the "Netflix Prize" to anyone who could use their 5-star ratings as input to help predict what movies to recommend.
text: BellKor, the winning algorithm, identified movies on 50 distinct dimensions.
text: That's not genres... its dimensions.
text: Each "genre" of movie was identified by a string of 50 numbers!
text: Trivially, if there were only two valid values on each dimension, that would qualify as 1,125,899,906,842,624 sub-genres! Woof!
answer_details: author: musicfans.stackexchange.com/users/3672/Cort Ammon
score: 4
sents: text: There are two main reasons: Marketing, it helps music find an audience.
text: Self-organization, it helps like-minded musicians create a virtualcommunity they can contextualize themselves against.
answer_details: author: musicfans.stackexchange.com/users/92/Chris Sunami supports Monica
score: 4
sents: text: It's probably true that no individual will 'need' a thousand or more subgenre labels.
text: Any given individual probably talks about, searches for, and thinks in terms of, a far more limited number of genres.
text: However, the number of labels 'out there' is the superset of all labels that have gained more than a certain amount of cultural currency - simplistically speaking, it's all labels that are used by anyone .
text: You may not use or need most of them, but for most of the ones you don't use, there's a group of people who do.
text: Of course the whole idea of genre labelling has a great many deficiencies.
text: In some spheres of activity, they've actually started to fall out of use - e.g. computer databases can now group similar music by direct measures of sonic similarity, rather than relying on a textual label.
text: However, people like to talk, and haven't yet come up with a nice concise way to answer the question: "
text: what kind of music do you like?"
text: without using genre labels.
text: As long as that's the case, the number of labels will only continue to grow! Remember that a genre label potentially needs to condense down a great number of characteristics to a single, memorable, descriptive name, so given the number of axes of variation possible, there's clearly potential for a lot of different genre names to be generated.
answer_details: author: musicfans.stackexchange.com/users/5605/topo Reinstate Monica
score: 2
sents: text: Because music is mushy mushy feely feely while computers and systems are rigid and strict.
text: This goes far beyond computers though.
text: Any system where we try to categorize a thing as only one category, gets messy.
text: Computers just allow us to do this with music in a more wide spread manor.
text: For example, Is an Insect, Ant, Fire Ant, and probably more.
text: Going the other way,
text: It's an insect, but it's not an Ant.
text: In the same way Rock Music Rock Music Rock Music Rock Music Rock Music You need something more.
text: Maybe you really like the first example, but your not in the mood for the last.
text: So how do you filter those down.
answer_details: author: musicfans.stackexchange.com/users/3670/coteyr
score: 2

Summary of the answers:
There is no need, they exist because someone wanted them to exist.
Subgenres are not needed and exist because someone wanted them to exist.