Music Genre Classification Revisited: An In-Depth Examination Guided by Music Experts

Abstract

Despite their many identified shortcomings, music genres are still often used as ground truth and as a proxy for music similarity. In this work we therefore take another in-depth look at genre classification, this time with the help of music experts. In comparison to existing work, we aim at including the viewpoint of different stakeholders to investigate whether musicians and end-user music taxonomies agree on genre ground truth, through a user study among 20 professional and semi-professional music protagonists. We then compare the results of their genre judgments with different commercial taxonomies and with that of computational genre classification experiments, and discuss individual cases in detail. Our findings coincide with existing work and provide further evidence that a simple classification taxonomy is insufficient.