Musicmap | The Genealogy and History of Popular Music Genres
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Musicmap attempts to provide the ultimate genealogy of popular music genres, including their relations and history. It is the result of more than seven years of research with over 200 listed sources and cross examination of many other visual genealogies. Its aim is to focus on the delicate balance between comprehensibility, accuracy and accessibility. In other words: the ideal genealogy is not only complete and correct, but also easy to understand despite its complexity. This is a utopian balance that can never be achieved but only approached. By choosing the right amount of genres, determining forms of hierarchy and analogy and ordering everything in a logical but authentic manner, a satisfactory balance can be obtained. Said balance is always the main subject of discussion in music genre genealogies and the capital reason why an absolute visual reference has been absent thus far (and probably always will be). Musicmap is a platform in search for the perfect balance of popular music genres to provide a powerful tool for educational means or a complementary framework in the field of music metadata and automatic taxonomy.
The main conceptual methods of musicmap to achieve a satisfactory equilibrium consist of grouping closely related genres together (“sibling genres”), color coding much larger genre groups (“super-genres”), and introducing a deeper layer of lesser influential subgenres. Hereby the total amount of the intermediate or main genres could be reduced to 234. This is deliberately far from the possible total amount of genres (approximately 600 or more, some sources claim over 1000) to enable easy orientation and good overview.
