Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Multi-tag search

Elias demonstrates the new Last.fm playground. I love the multi-tag search. I wonder if after 10-20 years of music sites like Last.fm and Pandora, which cater to individual taste, might start to change the vocabulary we use to describe music. Specifically, will genre labels go the way of the 8-track? Too vague and highly variable. Thinking about, genre was a product of record companies. Makes sense that as record companies are forced to change their structure that the vocabulary would go with it.

1 comment:

Elias said...

I guess it depends on the definition of what a genre label is, but when I think of genres I think of lo-fi, nintendocore and many others. I don't see a direct connection between those and the large record labels. And as far as I can tell finding creative names to describe new genres of music is becoming increasingly popular (e.g. death country). I think genres in music will be around for ever. However, I'd argue there are already so many different genres that single person can know them all (and their number is growing constantly). Furthermore, I think it is becoming generally accepted that any piece of music can be associated in varying degree to any number of genres. Or maybe I should say tags are the new genres?

Btw, there's a new tag related demonstration on playground now. Last weekends project ;-)