Wait... i thought that was the point.... listen to things you normally wouldnt listen to....

but i might be wrong.

An advice: go to your mp3 player. You'll find there tons of music you like.

lol yeah I thought you were supposed to explore different music and stuff that you dont normally like,
but I do completely agree with you. (At least most of the stuff on here isnt country)

Yea ! But ! No ! But ! ......The point is to share music.... And comment on other peoples music.....and vote!
ok maybe not vote but comment anyway, if you want to.
And if you dont like a song you go to the next without commenting. Thats bandAmp.
You can have 'favorite' members and a playlist of best songs.
Categorising the songs on upload has been suggested as has a second thread , one for as good as finished songs the other for 'noodles / need ideas' stage songs.

But the real point is, do you really think there's actually anyone out there who can do something about it?
As good and as well meant and as widely shared as your suggestion may be.

Pop ! There goes another bubble !

PHP is not in any way obscure it is very widely used on the web, but apparently the way bandAmp is written is obscure.
If you were to either join in / add your programmer suggestion to this thread : http://forum.bandamp.com/The_Pit/14266.html  or get in touch with TLS or TK then your idea will be closer to being realised.

I've seen that music can be categorized in approx 130 styles and I guess everyday there are born 2 new styles. that's ok. It's some time now that I thought about putting a combobox near to the upload button in that section where you can upload your music. MP3 has a tag for the category which is not always used by someone who exports his/her music to an MP3 file and then it could be done automatically. But in addition to that what kings said that this site is a site for reviewing music objective it is fair enough to listen also to other styles by other "musicians". Just press the stop button if you don't like it and move to another song. But personally I enjoy to open my mind and my musical ear to other styles, just to see what and how other people are recording and maybe to find out what the idea was to create music and sound in that way they did. This is why I am here.
The music by this members is free for download (very often) and please spend a little time to filter out what you don't like or what you usually hear.

I'm not sure about you guys, but I can usually make a pretty good educated guess about the genre of a song based on a combination of things: 1) works I've previously heard from a member and more importantly, 2) what they write down in the song description.

As much as I agree with every point of view, including my own, I still believe bandAmp needs to categorize / sort out (the men from the boys), it's the nature of the beast, stars above noodles below ! 

I am the Noodle King....  DOes that make me at the bottom?  heheehe...  Seriously though, Categories does have some merit, but dang it, it's really cool that you don't have to be labeled here.... Everyone here is a musician, and that's cool... And I truly never would have ever listened to Eftos or even Marino's newer stuff if it had been labeled Industrial... So, I enjoy having my eyes opened to that which I have never heard....

             JimK

Being the Noodle King puts you at the top and at the bottom and every where in between, all at the same time !

Well, let me bring some insight as to my idea has been for this rewrite effort I've been making:

Users can flag their songs as being influenced by certain genres.  1, 2 genres at the most.  As you upload music, your user profile totals up the genres you've listed for your songs, and it uses something like a star-graph (I can't explain very well, but I've already made the visual plan) to plot which genres the artist tends to incorporate.

TK, you mentioned just using the tag in the MP3 file, but I'm also convinced that it's a vain attempt.  people rarely fill those things out, especially if they exported it out of their studio and uploaded it.

In the end, I'm not really sure that I want to divide up the media types by genre by default.  As already stated, it would ruin the concept of the website.

However, in conjunction with the generated star graphs for each user, I've considered allowing you to sort the users by their major or secondary genre influences.  I think that's a fair thing to do, to allow you to see users who have the most influence in "classic rock" or "country" or "techno", but not necessarily sorting the SONGS by genre.

Opinions?

Sounds ok to me... Just make sure you incorporate a genre called "Silly Wacky unbelievable load of crap"  For me...

   That way I'll have an actual genre that fits my stuff! 


                   JimK

That seems reasonable to me. Just as long as it's not required for people to have to list their genre. I think some people might have trouble finding a genre to fit some of their songs (like me and Jim...)

Hmm maybe an added feature for reviewers to select tags to a song.. so eventually songs become browsable by genre (aren't they already? except tags are missing most of the time so the feature is kinda useless right now) and for other advanced statistics use. It may also be interesting to see how others classify someone's music. The number of genres should be limited to the ones most widely accepted ofcourse (not the most widely accepted genres, but genre names)... Hmm...

I agree, PX.  I'm not too interested in getting into specialized sub-genres.  I think a good range of broad ones should suffice, else every song would have to make its own genre practically

And yes, our current browse-by-genre is useless since tags aren't filled in.  Either that, or we really do have lots of "Blues" (the default ID2 tag for genre).

I also think it would be interesting to allow other users to submit what they think a song's genre is.

I think the major voice of objection is coming in fear that the site be permanently divided into genre pages.  I don't think that's a popular idea, but sorting by genre is an acceptable feature addition, in my opinion.

Forgot to address this..

I think that requiring genre isn't really a good thing.  But optionally supplying it would help site stats.  I think one of the main reasons for giving it is to help develop an image for each artist, a reputation on the AMP.  I think that sorting by genre is only a minor reason.

Not supplying the genre would just default to a blank one, not "Blues"