I wish this was open source and would accept pull requests. So many "wrong" examples in the genres I listen to.
But I guess it would end in endless edit wars. It took over 10 years to get some genres fixed on Discogs, people are unfortunately very stubborn about these things. Even with the artists saying their music is style X the mods wouldn't budge.
The fun thing is that the Guide v1.0 (the Flash version) was originally satire of the electronic music scene. Several of the music genres were flat out made up, with the audio samples being provided by ishkur under an alias (or ishkur's friends). But 20 years later, removed from the forum posts it was trying to parody, and it looks like an earnest exploration of late-90s electronica.
> Several of the music genres were flat out made up
I will always defend that buttrock is a real subgenre of psytrance. I don't care if Ishkur meant it as a joke or that nobody in the scene recognizes it.
I conversely think it's much better that it's made by just one very opinionated person. Sure, one could argue that some stuff is "wrong" but does it really matter when it's all so arbitrary anyway? I'm more interested in Ishkur's take on things than 100% correctness.
FWIW I also don't think artists themselves should be some kind of final arbiters on what genre their music is; "death of the author" and all that. Early italo disco musicians would probably not "correctly" categorize their music as something new and separate from the disco they were trying to emulate, for example.
Anyone should feel free to make "{HN handle's} Guide to Electronic Music"
Ishkur has never been anything but transparent that these are 120% his own opinions. (Mostly ranting about white Europeans ripping off funk rhythms :D)
> Even with the artists saying their music is style X the mods wouldn't budge.
I'm reminded of The Immortal Bard by Asimov. A professor of Physics gets drunk and is talking to an English teacher, telling him how he can bring people from the past to the present. At first it sounds like a drunken, but good story, but he explains that older scientists were unable to wrap their mind around the world as it is now, so he needed a more adaptable, universal, creative mind, and brings Shakespeare, who adjusts well.
Eventually he enrolled Shakespeare in a night school class on Shakespeare's plays—taught, as it happens, by the English teacher, who begins to become genuinely worried. He recalls a bald man with an unusual accent, and starts to doubt whether the story was all alcoholic fantasy. Timidly, he asks what happened, and the physicist explodes with anger. Shakespeare had been humiliated, he says, and had to be sent back to 1600: "You poor simpleton, you flunked him!"
I emailed him once like 20 years ago to tell him he was missing "cyber trance" (with a couple of examples), which is a genre and he rudely replied that it was not a genre.
Genre is subjective to a point though, like people including the artists will argue about what genre something is and there will be no consensus or any authority that says "it's this genre". It gets more complicated when genres get mixed. like djazz, which is a mix of djent and jazz, where djent is an offshoot of progressive metal named by Meshuggah but most djent is very dissimilar to Meshuggah so Meshuggah itself doesn't fit the djent mold.
But I guess it would end in endless edit wars. It took over 10 years to get some genres fixed on Discogs, people are unfortunately very stubborn about these things. Even with the artists saying their music is style X the mods wouldn't budge.