Christmas Is More Popular Than Porn
According to a recent study, about 1% of all pages have adult content.
According to the MusicDNS database, about 1.1% of all songs in the world are about Christmas.
Winner (by a bright red nose): Christmas!
Ho, ho, hold on a minute, what does that mean, exactly? Well, one of the new features we are working on for our MusicDNS service is the addition of genre information. Now genres are a finicky thing at best. Sometimes they tell you something about the music, sometimes they tell you something about the people who listen to the music, and sometimes they tell you about the people who market the music. (And sometimes they might not tell you anything at all…)
Rather than trying to define what genres mean acoustically, or impose a top-down schema from above, we have taken all the data collected anonymously from around the world by MusicIP users, and pulled out the most consistently used genres. This information will be available to all MusicDNS users at our normal rate (free, unless you generate crazy amounts of traffic, in which case we ask for a nominal fee to help keep the servers running).
The current set of genres which seem to occur with high regularity, uniqueness and consistency include the following: Bluegrass, Blues, Children, Christian, Christmas, Classical, Comedy, Country, Easy Listening, Electronica, Folk, Hip Hop, Jazz, New Age, Pop, R&B, Rap, Reggae, Rock, Soul, Spoken Word, World. I expect most people will have some objection or another to the previous list, but that’s where the data trends.
In MusicDNS, each track will receive 0, 1, or 2 genres from the above list. 0 genres means there is no consensus on fitting the track into the above categories, 1 means there is consensus on a single genre, 2 means there is split consensus on two genres (i.e. Rock/Country). The first genre will be the more prevalent opinion. Some applications may wish to normalize these genres, so “Christmas/Rock” and “Rock/Christmas” both become “Christmas Rock”. Or you may wish to drop the secondary genre altogether. How you use the genres is totally up to you (or the developer of the program you are using).
Which brings us back to Christmas. According to the current set of genres, the most popular genres currently have the following distribution:
| Percent | Genre |
| 30.4 | Rock |
| 11.4 | Pop |
| 10.3 | Blues |
| 8.2 | Classical |
| 7.4 | Jazz |
| 5.0 | Soundtrack |
| 3.8 | Hip Hop |
| 3.6 | Folk |
| 3.4 | Rap |
| 3.2 | Country |
| 2.6 | Spoken Word |
| 2.5 | Reggae |
| 2.5 | R&B |
| 2.3 | Electronica |
| 2.3 | World |
| 2.2 | Comedy |
| 1.4 | Easy Listening |
| 1.4 | New Age |
| 1.1 | Christmas |
Christmas music is a prime example of an oddball genre. If you had to define Christmas music acoustically, you’d be pretty hard pressed to cover the whole gamut. There are common themes, of course - religious or culturally based lyrics. And then there are simple tunes which evoke the feelings of Christmas, like Greensleeves. In the case of Christmas music, the combinations with subgenres more or less match the previous distribution, except the most popular combination is with Classical music, for 19.4% of the overall Christmas music (which is tagged with a secondary genre). On the other hand, Rap, Hip Hop, and Electronica hardly form a blip on the Christmas radar.
Finally, in the best gift giving tradition… looking for free Christmas music? Try Feels Like Christmas.
November 21st, 2006 at 1:08 am
Will the MusicIP genre associated with a song be able to be written back into the ID3 tags? I trust MIP with my genres more than I do other users.
November 21st, 2006 at 6:46 am
We’ll be adding more fields to the automatic tag fixing feature in a future release. (We’re still sorting out the exact feature set for the next Mixer release.)
December 7th, 2006 at 6:08 am
> MusicIP Mixer does not use your genre tags to create playlists
> this is just a tool to help you manage your music.
Hmnn, but exact that would be the goal. Can’t you implement
an option to use it (perharps defined as a filter or a switch )
December 7th, 2006 at 9:34 pm
You can certainly use genres in your filters - I just meant they don’t affect the acoustic recommendations. You can also use the “Restrict to genres” checkbox to autofilter to the same genre as the seed.
December 18th, 2006 at 1:16 pm
[…] Genre: As I mentioned in an earlier post, genre is a tricky thing. MusicDNS will be providing consensus genres, meaning the genres that most people have those tracks tagged as, aggregated to broad categories. To get this metadata from MusicDNS, pass the “rmd=2″ parameter (this will include the regular data returned from the older rmd=1 option). In a bit more technical fashion, here’s what you need to play with the new data now. First, it’s currently available at http://ofapreview.musicip.com, so you’ll need to use that instead of http://ofa.musicdns.org. This service accepts the same MusicDNS keys as the other service, and counts towards your total traffic.The /ofa/1/track? prefix remains the same, as there are no changes which will affect older clients. […]
February 3rd, 2007 at 8:17 pm
This genre tagging look really nice, but from what i can see on the list above, I am very affraid. I am a fan of Electronic music and I can’t imagine seeing my chill out music tagged with my house or jungle as Electronica…………
April 9th, 2007 at 3:18 pm
[…] Genre - We’ve covered this extensively in earlier posts. The MusicDNS genres are basically aggregated information on how most people classify their tracks generally. If you have used specific genres on your songs, you won’t want to overwrite those, but this can be convenient for quickly sorting all your unclassified tracks. […]