I’m cleaning up my iPod, and find myself ponder several issues regarding personal music classification. The music industry has saddled me with their obscure terms leaving me mystified as to how to group bands by genre. Really, can someone explain to me the difference between “R&B/Soul” and “R&B” and then tell me which group Seal belongs to? And when you’re done with that, explain to me how “Electronica” differs from “Electronica/Dance” and why the Swedish Synthpop group Covenant belongs to either category?

I can’t find a good model with examples. Apple’s classification genres are both too simple and too complex for my needs: Alternative, Audio Books, Blues, Children’s Music, Classical, Comedy, Country, Dance, Disney, Electronic, Folk, French Pop, German Pop, Hip Hop/Rap, Holiday, Inspirational, Jazz, Latin, New Age, Opera, Pop, R&B/Soul, Reggae, Rock, Soundtrack, Spoken Word, Vocal, World. These terms add little value — spoken word vs. vocal, anyone want to define that? Amazon provides finer divisions of music, but their taxonomy isn’t transparent and the music industry doesn’t follow it. I would almost prefer naked, meta-free music that I could classify if and when I wanted.

Almost as baffling as these genre terms are the lack of music management tools available in iTunes. Apple lets me create my own playlists, but doesn’t give me the ability to conveniently switch “T Bone Burnett” to “Burnett, T Bone” for the entire album (yes, I am that anal). I have to make changes line by line. What the hell? And I have almost 500 songs that are incorrectly classified “Unknown” that I want to switch to “French Lessons”. One solution would be to create playlists, but I do not want to do that when this should be a genre change. A playlist would be akin to lumping animals into genus without noting the phylum. I know you feel my pain.

I also want to switch the authoritative source of my updates to my iPod. Right now I believe my computer is considered the be all and end all when syncing up the changes I’ve made, but that doesn’t work for me. The computer is just the tool I use to render my MP3s and download more from various iSources. My iPod is where I listen to the music and where I’d like to manage it. I’m scared to sync now because I don’t want the garbage on my computer to overwrite the improvements I made on my iPod. And I don’t want to be stuck making changes in two places. Apple, are you listening!?!

Hey, while I’m ranting, does anyone know of a folksonomy for music? I’ve decided to classify Covenant as “Synthpop”, but would be curious where other fans are putting it.

They’re probably just listening to the music, which is what I should be doing instead of ranting. :-0