nostrich:

Hardly surprising — the rest, about another 200 apparently, just have whatever genre tag they came with. All my music is excellently tagged with as much information as possible. Except for the genre field. I don’t see the point; it seems too vague. Nonetheless, I would be interested to hear how people do it; how do you decide between Rock and Indie Rock (or Alternative Rock, or just Alternative, or Alternative Indie Post-Steampunk Rock)? Is it IDM or just Dance? What’s the difference between Europop, Synthpop, Power Pop, Dream Pop (my Chairlift album is tagged that, for some reason), and just plain Pop? I’ve noticed that even Wikipedia doesn’t have much consistency, and frequently lists multiple genres, a compulsion I often feel when attempting to define a genre. So please, do tell. Now that iTunes has made genre such a significant feature of my music collection, I feel like there’s a big hole in my library where organization goes to die.

Bonus link: iTunes Genres Pool on Flickr.

Honestly I’ve been all over the place on this one, but the (OCD) solution I’ve settled on for the past couple years is to keep the genres really broad (Rock, Jazz, Pop, etc) and then individually tag by artist, song, or album in the comments field (*alternative or *garagerock, etc), usually using Doug’s Applescripts, Quicksilver, or some other third party software. Then I use a folder of Smart albums for the individual sub-genres. When I have a question, I lean on allmusic.com for classification help.