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BuriedUnborn
Metal newbie

Joined: Wed Jul 26, 2017 12:01 pm
Posts: 318
Location: Inside your house
PostPosted: Sun Jul 24, 2022 5:12 am 
 

Are there any plans of standardizing genre tags? Because I've heard multiple times that there's no difference between "Doom/Heavy Metal" and "Heavy/Doom Metal", however, these two tags appears on the site everywhere, and it can get certainly confusing, and I'd argue that it can be even more confusing for new users or visitors who can't really tell the difference between "Heavy/Doom" and "Doom/Heavy" when there's actually none. I also ran into the issue that, when searching band by genre, it can get complicated to read and differentiate different genre tags that are actually the same thing, and when ordering my submissions on my profile by genre, I end up having "Heavy/Power" and "Power/Heavy" bands at different places in the list, which makes it a bit annoying since I kinda like killing time getting an overall idea of what I submit the most.

I've thought of two ideas to standardize genres on the site:

1. Turn all variations for a genre into one; instead of having "black/death" and "death/black", just have "black/death"; to make things easier, we could order the tags alphabetically, but always leaving non-metal genres as the last (such as "Doom/Stoner Metal/Psychedelic Rock").

2. Maybe more subjective and a headache to implement, but maybe we can assume that there is a difference between "power/thrash" and "thrash/power", where we'd assume that there are greater elements of the first genre in the band's music.

Perhaps this is overthinking it, but perhaps we could make the database more tidy and comprehensive by applying either of these standardizations. The second one, however, would be practically impossible to implement since it's subjective and it would mean going through all the bands already on the site. However, the first one could very well be applied.
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Derigin
The Mountain Man

Joined: Sun Jan 01, 2006 6:25 am
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Location: Canada
PostPosted: Sun Jul 24, 2022 11:18 am 
 

#2 is irrelevant because there is no difference between "power/thrash" or "thrash/power". Metalheads have their preferences (you do see many listing them alphabetically), but the formatting doesn't change that the band's music is a mix of both genres, and the order doesn't imply one is greater than the other. The only time where that is implied is when you have the syntax "X genre with Y influences" where the Y influences are a minor contributing factor to the music... but those situations are less commonly seen on MA.

I don't see a problem, personally, in having a consistent formatting across the site for cases where genres are, like the above, the same thing no matter how it's written. I suppose the reason nobody has bothered to do anything about it is two-fold: it's a monumental task, and it's a task that doesn't really change/improve the site beyond just wanting some level of consistency. A person reading "power/thrash" and "thrash/power" should understand that in both scenarios the music is a mix of both in some form.
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Kennermahn
Metalhead

Joined: Fri Jan 04, 2019 1:36 am
Posts: 616
PostPosted: Sun Jul 24, 2022 3:39 pm 
 

BuriedUnborn wrote:
Are there any plans of standardizing genre tags? Because I've heard multiple times that there's no difference between "Doom/Heavy Metal" and "Heavy/Doom Metal", however, these two tags appears on the site everywhere, and it can get certainly confusing, and I'd argue that it can be even more confusing for new users or visitors who can't really tell the difference between "Heavy/Doom" and "Doom/Heavy" when there's actually none. I also ran into the issue that, when searching band by genre, it can get complicated to read and differentiate different genre tags that are actually the same thing, and when ordering my submissions on my profile by genre, I end up having "Heavy/Power" and "Power/Heavy" bands at different places in the list, which makes it a bit annoying since I kinda like killing time getting an overall idea of what I submit the most.


Well, there's actually a difference between "Doom/Heavy Metal" and "Heavy/Doom Metal", the idea is that what's on the left is the dominant style, the problem is that it finally depends on what the person setting the genre perceives, and sometimes it's a very hard call to make; also sometimes bands start leaning in way over time. This order is not pointless, I think it's particularly useful with death/doom and doom/death bands, where the difference in sound can be more easily felt.

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BuriedUnborn
Metal newbie

Joined: Wed Jul 26, 2017 12:01 pm
Posts: 318
Location: Inside your house
PostPosted: Mon Jul 25, 2022 12:51 am 
 

Kennermahn wrote:
the idea is that what's on the left is the dominant style, the problem is that it finally depends on what the person setting the genre perceives, and sometimes it's a very hard call to make; also sometimes bands start leaning in way over time. This order is not pointless, I think it's particularly useful with death/doom and doom/death bands, where the difference in sound can be more easily felt.


I was thinking that we may have a subconscious bias which makes us put the genre we find to be predominant to the left, which could make the 2nd alternative I proposed the default one in a way.
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odium
Metal newbie

Joined: Fri Sep 17, 2004 3:32 pm
Posts: 216
Location: Lithuania
PostPosted: Tue Jul 26, 2022 5:09 am 
 

Kennermahn wrote:
Well, there's actually a difference between "Doom/Heavy Metal" and "Heavy/Doom Metal", the idea is that what's on the left is the dominant style, the problem is that it finally depends on what the person setting the genre perceives, and sometimes it's a very hard call to make.

Agree here; but I always give the dominance of the style that is on the right side of genre description.

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Zerberus
Metalhead

Joined: Sun Mar 09, 2008 4:29 pm
Posts: 2325
Location: Denmark
PostPosted: Mon Aug 08, 2022 4:49 am 
 

Recently I've been kinda partial to a system of separate genre "tags", so you would have a repository of tags you could list in the genre field on bands. Personally I would do away with the "descriptors" such as 'Epic' and 'Depressive' in the vast majority of cases.

Bal-Sagoth
Symphonic Metal; Black Metal; Heavy Metal

Manowar
Heavy Metal; Power Metal

Belphegor
Death Metal; Black Metal
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BuriedUnborn
Metal newbie

Joined: Wed Jul 26, 2017 12:01 pm
Posts: 318
Location: Inside your house
PostPosted: Tue Aug 09, 2022 12:50 pm 
 

Zerberus wrote:
Recently I've been kinda partial to a system of separate genre "tags", so you would have a repository of tags you could list in the genre field on bands. Personally I would do away with the "descriptors" such as 'Epic' and 'Depressive' in the vast majority of cases.

Bal-Sagoth
Symphonic Metal; Black Metal; Heavy Metal

Manowar
Heavy Metal; Power Metal

Belphegor
Death Metal; Black Metal


Eh, the issue with this is that the site already uses tags separated like this to point out that a certain band played different genres throughout their career.
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Zerberus
Metalhead

Joined: Sun Mar 09, 2008 4:29 pm
Posts: 2325
Location: Denmark
PostPosted: Tue Aug 09, 2022 2:13 pm 
 

BuriedUnborn wrote:

Eh, the issue with this is that the site already uses tags separated like this to point out that a certain band played different genres throughout their career.


If it was the direction they'd go with I'm sure they could solve that issue somehow.
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NurseWitchWound
Metal newbie

Joined: Thu Nov 26, 2020 10:33 am
Posts: 34
Location: Northern Mariana Islands
PostPosted: Sun Aug 14, 2022 3:48 pm 
 

The difference between Black/Death and Death/Black is dependant on which sound is dominant.
Black/Death should be more death orientated bands like Acheron or Behemoth.
Death/Black should be more black like Mortuary Drape, Goatlord, Mortuary (UK), or anything that sounds like Deathcrush by Mayhem.
But again this is gonna be confusing for a lot of people and I think bands like Blasphemy are in the complete middle.

Zerberus wrote:
Recently I've been kinda partial to a system of separate genre "tags", so you would have a repository of tags you could list in the genre field on bands. Personally I would do away with the "descriptors" such as 'Epic' and 'Depressive' in the vast majority of cases.
Bal-Sagoth
Symphonic Metal; Black Metal; Heavy Metal
Manowar
Heavy Metal; Power Metal
Belphegor
Death Metal; Black Metal

The ";" tag like this is used with bands like Dissection who play either Melodic Death Metal and Melodic Black Metal on whatever releases. Belphegor is mix of Black and Death and they're way more focused on the death metal side.
Also symphonic metal isn't really a genre, it's symphonic black metal a style started with bands like Master's Hammer and Emperor.
Also Depressive Black Metal is a specific style of playing, listen to Strid's 1994 EP and Xasthur and Happy Days. Same with Epic weather that's Epic Doom like Candlemass or Epic Black like Moonblood.

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Zerberus
Metalhead

Joined: Sun Mar 09, 2008 4:29 pm
Posts: 2325
Location: Denmark
PostPosted: Mon Aug 15, 2022 3:53 am 
 

NurseWitchWound wrote:
The difference between Black/Death and Death/Black is dependant on which sound is dominant.
Black/Death should be more death orientated bands like Acheron or Behemoth.
Death/Black should be more black like Mortuary Drape, Goatlord, Mortuary (UK), or anything that sounds like Deathcrush by Mayhem.
But again this is gonna be confusing for a lot of people and I think bands like Blasphemy are in the complete middle.

Zerberus wrote:
Recently I've been kinda partial to a system of separate genre "tags", so you would have a repository of tags you could list in the genre field on bands. Personally I would do away with the "descriptors" such as 'Epic' and 'Depressive' in the vast majority of cases.
Bal-Sagoth
Symphonic Metal; Black Metal; Heavy Metal
Manowar
Heavy Metal; Power Metal
Belphegor
Death Metal; Black Metal

The ";" tag like this is used with bands like Dissection who play either Melodic Death Metal and Melodic Black Metal on whatever releases. Belphegor is mix of Black and Death and they're way more focused on the death metal side.
Also symphonic metal isn't really a genre, it's symphonic black metal a style started with bands like Master's Hammer and Emperor.
Also Depressive Black Metal is a specific style of playing, listen to Strid's 1994 EP and Xasthur and Happy Days. Same with Epic weather that's Epic Doom like Candlemass or Epic Black like Moonblood.


I don't necessarily disagree with your takes, but the more granular you want your level of detail for genre descriptions, the more people are going to disagree. As an example, in the Death/Black vs Black/Death discussion, I usually list the dominant genre first, not last.
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Midnightwards666
Heavy Metal C-3PO

Joined: Tue Aug 02, 2011 7:05 am
Posts: 975
Location: United Kingdom
PostPosted: Mon Aug 15, 2022 12:25 pm 
 

Out of the two ideas, I would say the first is the better one... although to go through the hundreds of thousands of bands and edit every genre tag to ensure bands have their multiple genres listed alphabetically would be an extremely low priority for those with a sufficient rank to edit genre tags, and that's "Metal lord" and above only. A huge amount of effort for a very very minor aesthetical improvement.

The second idea seems impossible to implement as you would rarely have all moderators agreeing, and I hope for the sake of this site that they would not waste time with such discussions. What would happen for a black/death metal band when some of their albums have more death and others black? I have never seen it written anywhere that the genre listed first is dominant over the second. Even if having the dominant genre listed first is the very slightly preferred format, it's an extremely minor detail and any inaccuracies I stumble across while browsing the site wouldn't bother me in the slightest. Most importantly, both genres are listed either way and all the key information is there.

While I am not against having standardized genre tags, it just seems like far too much of a minor detail to be worth any staff effort.
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BuriedUnborn
Metal newbie

Joined: Wed Jul 26, 2017 12:01 pm
Posts: 318
Location: Inside your house
PostPosted: Wed Aug 17, 2022 3:01 am 
 

Midnightwards666 wrote:
Out of the two ideas, I would say the first is the better one... although to go through the hundreds of thousands of bands and edit every genre tag to ensure bands have their multiple genres listed alphabetically would be an extremely low priority for those with a sufficient rank to edit genre tags, and that's "Metal lord" and above only. A huge amount of effort for a very very minor aesthetical improvement.


Since the database of the site is SQL, I believe, you can just do some quick queries and replace all entries that have "Death/Black" with "Black/Death". Not truly necessary to do it manually.
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Zerberus
Metalhead

Joined: Sun Mar 09, 2008 4:29 pm
Posts: 2325
Location: Denmark
PostPosted: Wed Aug 17, 2022 3:34 am 
 

BuriedUnborn wrote:
Midnightwards666 wrote:
Out of the two ideas, I would say the first is the better one... although to go through the hundreds of thousands of bands and edit every genre tag to ensure bands have their multiple genres listed alphabetically would be an extremely low priority for those with a sufficient rank to edit genre tags, and that's "Metal lord" and above only. A huge amount of effort for a very very minor aesthetical improvement.


Since the database of the site is SQL, I believe, you can just do some quick queries and replace all entries that have "Death/Black" with "Black/Death". Not truly necessary to do it manually.


Yeah, replacing the genre descriptions with a different naming convention should be pretty easy. I imagine that once you've done it for all the common descriptions, there will only be a small handful of bands left to change manually.
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Midnightwards666
Heavy Metal C-3PO

Joined: Tue Aug 02, 2011 7:05 am
Posts: 975
Location: United Kingdom
PostPosted: Thu Aug 18, 2022 5:38 pm 
 

If that can be quickly done by the site owners, great, I have no clue. It's ultimately up to them.
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Hellow2
Mallcore Kid

Joined: Sun Dec 12, 2021 12:49 pm
Posts: 8
PostPosted: Mon Sep 26, 2022 7:40 pm 
 

PLEASE make genres more standardized. Parsing them into a tidy database was hell. I wasted hours on it and just ended up saving them as string anyways.

But I understand that this would be hard to implement, due to the parsing being so hard to do.

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KingSpooky
The Man, The Machine, The Legend

Joined: Tue Apr 29, 2008 5:24 pm
Posts: 4500
Location: United States
PostPosted: Mon Sep 26, 2022 8:20 pm 
 

If there's a specific subgenre that it would make sense to standardize (like adding heavy metal to NWOBHM, that was taken care of recently so that those bands will turn up under a search for heavy metal within the United Kingdom), feel free to give the suggestion and reason for it, and people who are able to adjust genres can take the post into consideration and make the adjustment if they think it would be a worthwhile use of time/effort. At least some of the genres are listed with the most dominant genre first, and that has taken some time to individually consider/list in the way that it is. Most users probably know this already, but typing in a dash before something that you don't want to turn up in the search, like -symphonic will remove results with that word in the genre, if unwanted results are part of the problem that anyone is having.

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yungstirjoey666
Metalhead

Joined: Mon Sep 23, 2019 8:47 am
Posts: 639
Location: United States
PostPosted: Tue Oct 11, 2022 8:45 am 
 

I notice that there's a bit of a problem when it comes to multiple word tagging in the genre search. For example, searching up 'melodic death' result in bands that have 'melodic' and 'death' in their tags, but it doesn't always assure that they play melodic death metal (eg. a band could play melodic black earlier and pure death metal later, and still show up when you search for melodic death bands, as in the case of Chinese band Ritual Day: https://www.metal-archives.com/search/a ... ame=#bands).

I guess using quotations with "melodic death" could be more useful, but due to concatenating issues, this only includes clusters of melodic and death together, and takes away bands that are labeled as 'melodic x/death metal' or 'melodic/x death metal.' Unless if the melodic death clusters in the Archives does mean that there is more of an emphasis of melodic death metal.

My purpose here is to count the percent of melodic death bands by country so that I can use this data to create a map (something that I generally like doing in my free time).


Last edited by yungstirjoey666 on Tue Oct 11, 2022 10:12 am, edited 1 time in total.
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KingSpooky
The Man, The Machine, The Legend

Joined: Tue Apr 29, 2008 5:24 pm
Posts: 4500
Location: United States
PostPosted: Tue Oct 11, 2022 8:55 am 
 

Searching with an asterisk is what you'd want to do in that case. Then you'll get the results that include words and symbols (such as /) before and after those words, with nothing left out:

https://www.metal-archives.com/search/a ... ame=#bands

From there you can search by country.

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yungstirjoey666
Metalhead

Joined: Mon Sep 23, 2019 8:47 am
Posts: 639
Location: United States
PostPosted: Tue Oct 11, 2022 10:11 am 
 

I don't think it did much, because there's still the issue with Ritual Day being in the search. There really should at least be some parsing when it comes to grouping genres by earlier/mid/later discography.

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KingSpooky
The Man, The Machine, The Legend

Joined: Tue Apr 29, 2008 5:24 pm
Posts: 4500
Location: United States
PostPosted: Tue Oct 11, 2022 10:16 am 
 

Well, bands sometimes change their sound over time - but keep the same name. There's a lot of effort put into covering their full genre throughout the span of their existence on the site. Surely you realize going into a project like what you spoke of setting out to do you know there would be some case-by-case basis involved? Like I said a few posts up, requests for genre changes should be specific, and there should be a reason for them to take place. What you're saying makes me wonder if you also want us to type the keys on the keyboard for you in your search.

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yungstirjoey666
Metalhead

Joined: Mon Sep 23, 2019 8:47 am
Posts: 639
Location: United States
PostPosted: Tue Oct 11, 2022 10:50 am 
 

If I have to be specific, I think something like a semicolon could be used to separate from genre changes throughout a range of discographies, where the colon determines if there is at least one particular era where a band plays that searched genre tag. For example, searching up 'atmospheric black;' can help find bands that are just labeled as 'atmospheric black metal' or something complex like 'atmospheric doom metal (early); atmospheric death/black (later),' but excludes anything like 'atmospheric doom metal (early); black/thrash metal (later),' because that band has never played any atmospheric black metal throughout their discography, even though they have been atmospheric and black metal at some point of their career, but not both at the same time. In this case, all uses of semicolons should be only used to separate discography eras.

Of course, I understand something like this may be difficult to properly parse, and if it can't work without edge cases, then I could just manually search up the bands myself. But the Metal Archives community usually treats melodeath as a separate genre by itself.

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KingSpooky
The Man, The Machine, The Legend

Joined: Tue Apr 29, 2008 5:24 pm
Posts: 4500
Location: United States
PostPosted: Tue Oct 11, 2022 11:01 am 
 

When there are early and later sections to the genre, they're separated by semicolon. Sometimes Melodic Death Metal is combined with other genres, though - like Progressive, Technical, etc. Here's an example where any that include Deathcore are left out (adding -*typetermhere* to the search).

Some examples-
Without Deathcore:
https://www.metal-archives.com/search/a ... ame=#bands

Without Technical:
https://www.metal-archives.com/search/a ... ame=#bands

Without a semicolon in the genre field - so there will be no (early) / (later) in these results. Then you can continue searching with this on if you don't wish to see bands that changed their genre enough that it had been deemed substantial enough that an (early) and (later) should be used.
https://www.metal-archives.com/search/a ... ame=#bands

You can search with a lot of those search cancellations at the same time also.

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yungstirjoey666
Metalhead

Joined: Mon Sep 23, 2019 8:47 am
Posts: 639
Location: United States
PostPosted: Tue Oct 11, 2022 1:13 pm 
 

I guess the idea of excluding ';' at first when keeping track of bands who played melodeath throughout, then recording all bands with the semicolon (there shouldn't be too many bands, especially since we're using multiple word tagging) to find all bands that did play melodeath at one point (eg. In Flames) seems good enough for me.

I still think the ; colon should only be used for dividing discography eras, especially in the case of these 47 bands that aren't like such:
https://www.metal-archives.com/search/a ... ame=#bands

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KingSpooky
The Man, The Machine, The Legend

Joined: Tue Apr 29, 2008 5:24 pm
Posts: 4500
Location: United States
PostPosted: Tue Oct 11, 2022 1:32 pm 
 

I don't understand why there's a semicolon present in those 44 (I fixed a few of them that weren't correct). They should probably be gone through by a moderator to figure out if a comma should be there instead, or if it should also say (early); (later) but doesn't currently. I only knew of semicolons to be used for cases of early/later.

Glad to hear that you find that searching method to be sufficient.

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KingSpooky
The Man, The Machine, The Legend

Joined: Tue Apr 29, 2008 5:24 pm
Posts: 4500
Location: United States
PostPosted: Tue Oct 18, 2022 4:42 pm 
 

The 44 bands mentioned in the post above whose genres had a semicolon without (earlier) / (later) are fixed. They mostly needed to be replaced with a comma or slash, and the words moved around slightly in a couple of cases.

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