I’m not really sure that I use genre information too much in organizing my library, but that’s not to say that I don’t want it to be correct when it’s applied.
My years working in the classical music world taught me how painfully insufficient existing music metadata tagging is for classical music — e.g. movements and composers and conductors matter a lot and are such a challenge in Apple Music that Apple released a classical-only app that admittedly does a really decent job handling the complexity of classical music metadata.
As I’ve been ripping some legacy CDs into lossless over to my Navidrome box, I’m laughing at the default tags applied to the CDs as they’re ripped. Everything from Emmylou Harris to Asleep at the Wheel to the Stanley Brothers gets categorized as “Country & Folk” which is crazy. Western Swing which isn’t even an option in Apple Music. I’m not saying Country has the same attribute complexity as classical, but from an organization/genre perspective there are definitely some nuances that could be captured better out of the gate.
From what I can tell, Apple uses Gracenote to pull in metadata and genre info. MusicBrainz gets a bit closer, calling the Bob Wills tribute album “Country” with the default scan and does offer the ability to customize how genres are handled. I could choose to include or exclude certain genres, or set it to only use specific genre tags.
Might need to bake these in to Apple Music/Navidrome:
- Bluegrass
- Bluegrass/Country Gospel
- Traditional Country
- Honky Tonk
- Outlaw Country
- Country Rock
- Country Pop
- Western Swing
- Rockabilly
- Cajun and Zydeco
The real question though is what to do with what the Country Music establishment refers to as “Americana” which is really Country, whereas the “Country” pushed by the Country Music establishment is best defined as bro-Country or maybe jingo-Country?