What? You don't know your progressive house from your deep disco house? What kind of a music lover are you?
But thanks to Every Noise At Once by Glenn McDonald, you no longer have to wonder the difference between "black metal," "pagan black metal," and "dark black metal."
McDonald, who works as "genre taxonomist" over at Echo Nest sure knows his stuff. His website not only displays over a thousand music genres, but you can also explore 30 seconds Spotify clips of music representative of that genre by clicking on the individual link.
McDonald wrote on the website:
This is an ongoing attempt at an algorithmically-generated, readability-adjusted scatter-plot of the musical genre-space, based on data tracked and analyzed for 1215 genres by The Echo Nest. The calibration is fuzzy, but in general down is more organic, up is more mechanical and electric; left is denser and more atmospheric, right is spikier and bouncier.
For example, clicking on "melodic death metal" plays a tune from that genre. Clicking on the double arrows open another cloud of bands that belong to that genre:
Not just death metal, mind you. Melodic death metal, which includes such bands as "Septic Flesh," "Dark Tranquility," and "Nightrage."
Post Disco? Disco is not over yet for me!
Apparently, Ninja is now a musical genre!
You can even find the musical genre classification of your favorite artist!
Happy exploring!
Personally, I think a lot of it is self-indulgent people who kid themselves that what they're doing is "different" and justifies a new name when it's just derivative. But then I'm an old git who can't get to grips with modern "music".