Rearranging My iTunes Genres

I got my first iPod back in 2011. I know this was quite late; I think most people were moving away from iPods right at the time I was getting into mine! At the time I had a laptop with Ubuntu, and I used some kind of weird Ubuntu iPod management software, but I quickly gave up on both of those experiments and began using iTunes like a regular person.

I love iTunes. I don't know why people denigrate it. You can do a lot of incredibly cool stuff with "Smart Playlists," and I have all sorts of them that I use for a variety of purposes. But to make some of these features useful, you have to be consistent and thoughtful in the way you use genres. At the time, the bulk of my music collection was soundtrack music. (It still is, but that was even more true back then.*) I was a very late arrival to pop/rock music, not until my mid-20s!

By the end of 2012, I had 880 non-soundtrack/classical tracks on my iPod. Over time I ended up with the bulk of those tracks in four genres. (To be honest, I don't know if people who actually know things about music would agree with these designations.) In parentheses, I'll tell you what artists dominated those genres as of 2012, as I mostly made my choices based on similarity: what existing artist did a new-to-me one resemble? I would place additions based on that.

• Alternative Rock: Music with a rock edge (Rogue Traders and Yeah Yeah Yeahs)
• Electronica: Electronic-inflected dance music (Goldfish and Nortec Collective)
• Indie: Singer-songwriter or folksy stuff (The Decemberists and Regina Spektor)
• Pop: More mainstream (Kate Nash and Adele)

I should note I had some other genres floating around for stuff that didn't fit in these four, but none of them had much in them: Blues/R&B, Folk, Geek, Jazz, Musicals, and Rock.

But the genre system that worked fifteen years ago when I had 900 tracks has been working less well now that I have almost 3,000. Some of my buckets were huge. So, this summer, I started thinking about how I might rearrange my genres.

Only, as I said, I don't know much about music! If I was going to split, say, "Pop" up into subgenres... what would those be?

In order to solve this problem, I ended up signing up for an account on Rate Your Music, whose users have some incredibly in-depth genre classifications. For example, my most recent library addition, Kate Nash's 9 Sad Symphonies (2018), has been classified with a main genre of "Sophisti-Pop" and additional genres of Chamber Pop, Pop Soul, Baroque Pop, and Indie Pop! Working with RYM's genres as inspirations, I managed to split things up a bit and came up with this:

• Alternative Rock: Still music with a rock edge (They Might Be Giants, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Rogue Traders)
• Art Pop: This pulled from the existing Indie, Pop, and Alternative Rock genres, grabbing poppy music with less of a singer-songwriter vibe, a more weird edge, and more lush instrumentation (Regina Spektor, Kate Nash, Florence + the Machine)
• Electronica: Still electronic-inflected dance music (Goldfish and Nortec Collective)
• Indie Folk: Half of my Indie music went here, stuff that was more, well, folky (The Decemberists, The Weepies)
• Indie Pop: The other of my existing Indie music went here, the more poppy stuff (Ingrid Michaelson, Alfa)
• Mainstream Pop: All the pop music that was left, typically with a more mainstream style than Art Pop or Indie Pop (Lena, Lily Allen, Adele)

My biggest difficulty was that I now have a lot of They Might Be Giants tracks, a full 533. (That's over a sixth of my library!) I did not want Alternative Rock to be even more dominated by TMBG than it already is, so I could not split Alternative Rock up very much if I want shuffling Alternative Rock to not just be de facto shuffling TMBG. So it remains very big. (My wife suggested making TMBG into its own genre! I feel like this has some merit, but I would sometimes like to listen to it mixed in with other stuff.)

Since I was doing this, I also took a look at rearranging my soundtrack music. While I have 900 tracks of pop/rock music, I have around 7,000 of soundtrack! This was originally in two big buckets: Orchestral and Electronic. I ended up rearranging this into four. Mostly, I split Orchestral up into two parts, "TV Orchestral" and "Film Orchestral." But I also created a new Games genre, that mostly drew from Electronic, but also one orchestral game soundtrack I owned.

I used ChatGPT to create a cool Sankey diagram of my rearranged genres: 

(You'll see I also merged some of my little-used genres, combining Geek with Musicals and Jazz with Blues/R&B.) 

I am pretty happy with the result! In particular, I think the new "Art Pop" genre is putting together some stuff that plays well together but I have not previously listened to together, and the new Indie genres mean some artists are getting more play time because they're no longer buried. I do wish there was a way to further split Alternative Rock, but I guess that will have to wait until I have more non-TMBG tracks in that genre.

* For the most part, it's been a gradual shift, but it has shifted over time. You can see it here: