The Genre Committee

who sits on the "Genre Committee" that decides what music is part of what genre?

As I spent the better part of the last 4 days uploading the bulk of my CD collection to iTunes, to dump to my iPod, I noted that some of the genres chosen were laughable.

(metrics: 474 CDs equalled 5470 songs; 14.5 days; 19.34 GB) Once on my Mac, the download to the iPod took 60 minutes.

My biggest peeve is with the [World] genre; this should be abolished (it's very US-centric). At minimum I'd replace it with the country of the musicians. Seeing [Haiti] and [Senegal] means much more to me than (Rest Of) "World" - permanently relegating any non-US music as Second Class. Bah.

Actually, They* do an adequate job most of the time. iTunes' alternative is what you see when no Internet connection is available; the songs are imported with generic names: Track 01; Track 02 and so forth. (Advanced/Get CD Track Names will fetch the CDDB info after the fact, as needed)

*"They" is in flux, apparently; given the history behind the CDDB (and freedb), it's amazing this continues to work at all. iTunes is using Gracenote; there's no (obvious) way to change that provider.

While it was amusing to see "Weird Al" Yankovic put into the [Books & Spoken] genre, it was downright irritating to find no consistency among my American Indian selections .. listed randomnly as [World], [Folk], or [Unclassifiable].

Other examples: my Reggae CDs became [International] .. distinct from [World], mind you! Clannad's music became [Folk] (versus Celtic). Apparently They were trying to keep it down to 20 genres, worldwide. Oh, please.

And don't even get me started on the "Soundtrack" category. Most of the songs are compiliations, so labeling an album as one genre when the individual songs are quite different just .. well .. befuddles me.