Too many genre tags!

[Trot Shuffle 3,592]

I've noticed too many genre tags, most of them are redundant and a "hoof"-full are unn ecessary. This seems to have led to songs being split up over the platform's existence, overall making it a bit difficult for uploaders or artists to reach potential new listeners and adds extra unnecessary steps for any listeners to find what's available under their preferred music styles.

I'm not sure if anyone's even mentioned it before, couldn't find anything. It's flexible but currently I think flexible towards the "wrong" direction if that makes any sense? As in, it splits more than unite.

An example of redundancy:

As a listener, I should not have to click on every spelling variation of Hip Hop to find everything that's supposed to be Hip Hop. As an uploader/artist, perhaps some sort of autofill or auto-suggest? I literally don't see why there are "hip-Hop", "HIp-Hop", and "Hip-Hop" tags. Seriously? 

This is the exact same situation as other genre tags too.

 

An example of unnecessary:

literally no idea what those are supposed to be, some special unicode or emojis? 

 

And funny enough as a listener you're free to select as many genres to sort through but it seems as an uploader you can only add one tag per song upload (I don't know if it was like that in the past but changed now? And these ended being grandfathered in?)

So as a compromise people have done something like this for songs that qualify for a bunch of genres or styles (three... uh... two more actually can be also seen in the first image above):

Just based on this example (one of many), the system seems to currently take "Piano / Ambient / Experimental" as one literal genre tag rather than separate. (Unless I'm blind, you wouldn't be able to find these under "Experimental" for instance which ideally they should also be under there. I was only able to find them under "Piano / Ambient / Experimental".)

It's quite common for songs to be listed under more than one genre elsewhere so a system that would make that more convenient I think would work here also.

For instance, say if I uploaded a song that is a mixture of some experimental Metal (maybe more specifically, Death Metal) and Drum and Bass (maybe more specifically, Neurofunk). I should be able to tag it as "Metal", "Drum and Bass", "Death Metal, "Neurofunk", and "Experimental" instead of doing a "strange" custom tag, "Metal / Drum and Bass / Death Metal / Neurofunk / Experimental". That way if anyone filters for, say "Neurofunk", they will find my song under there instead of having to specifically go to "Metal / Drum and Bass / Death Metal / Neurofunk / Experimental" (which the latter also makes it stand out because of how "complicated" the singular tag is while simultaneously making it difficult for anyone to come across it if they were specifically originally looking for Metal or whatever else, they could've enjoyed it but now they've missed it).

Discogs I think is the best example of what I mean by this (images below purely as examples):

sorry, last one felt obligatory  But hopefully you see what i mean!! 

Of course, the intentions of Discogs is a lot different as it's meant to be the Wikipedia x IMDB x Internet Archive x Ebay x [insert social media site here] for any released musical works, but they do have a valid genre tagging system (styles too) which is great (great database overall, it gets incredibly specific at times but that's getting sidetracked now).

You know what, now that's made me think a little more for Pony.fm. How about Genres just containing blanket terms and then anything more specific under "Style(s)" or similar? IMO that would work a lot better than right now. Please convince me otherwise!

 

 

Also on Pony.fm it has led to some funny ones which did make me giggle:

 i hope they figured out how to do electro house after that 

 Did they get hungry??? 

  could be anything! hehe /)

 

[Twilight Sparkle ✨ 8,520]

This is excellent feedback and I'm glad someone cares enough about Pony.fm to have noticed and written it up. Thank you, @Trot Shuffle!

There's an ancient planned task to replace all of Pony.fm's taxonomies (including genres) with a more sophisticated tagging system. The problem is that Pony.fm has lacked an active developer to work on it for a long time so this and other tasks have been sitting on pause until someone who can do more than keep the site going in maintenance mode comes along again.

However! The genres that do exist could certainly do with some cleanup. I'll take a pass through the list, especially all those hip-hop ones. We do have a tool for site admins to merge genres together at least.

[Twilight Sparkle ✨ 8,520]

I did some cleanup of the most obvious duplicate and nonsense genres. Accidentally managed to merge the "Game" and "Unknown" genres together so... whoops.  At least "Game" isn't actually a genre so I'll rename it to "Unknown" once it's done doing the merge (it'll take a while - the site rewrites the tags in all the downloadable files). I'll come back to this thread later.

[Trot Shuffle 3,592]

47 minutes ago, Twilight Sparkle ✨ said:

I did some cleanup of the most obvious duplicate and nonsense genres.

Glad to hear! A little bit of housekeeping here and there never hurts 

1 hour ago, Twilight Sparkle ✨ said:

There's an ancient planned task to replace all of Pony.fm's taxonomies (including genres) with a more sophisticated tagging system. The problem is that Pony.fm has lacked an active developer to work on it for a long time so this and other tasks have been sitting on pause until someone who can do more than keep the site going in maintenance mode comes along again.

Oh, interesting. The booru system would work too, havent even thought of that!

It's a bit sad for me to hear that it's been in limbo for a good while. Aww, a neglected child 

I would help but my knowledge of web development in general does not go beyond poking very basic code with a twig and hoping it does something. So hopefully someone who does know more and sees the potential does come along! 

2 hours ago, Twilight Sparkle ✨ said:

This is excellent feedback and I'm glad someone cares enough about Pony.fm to have noticed and written it up. Thank you, @Trot Shuffle!

Ohh you're welcome and so much appreciated!

Of course, there are other platforms which allow music to be uploaded (even back then) but Pony.fm is clear that its meant for pony musicians. Also its a time capsule of some obscure and "lost" brony songs! It'd certainly be a shame to see this disappear one day! 

1 hour ago, Twilight Sparkle ✨ said:

Accidentally managed to merge the "Game" and "Unknown" genres together so... whoops.  

Hehe, just a little bit of tomfoolery 

[Ice Princess Silky 10,820]

Awwww, thank you for your input, Trotshuffle. You little adorabean.

[Trot Shuffle 3,592]

I've also realized that there may be a broken link/redirect to the dev blog? Not sure how long it's been like that but yes.