Online music store, Beatport, has this week announced plans to do away with its oft-maligned genre classification system and distill its entire categorisation down to just two headings “good” and “shit”.
“People have been complaining for years about the increasing difficulty of navigating the genre lists on the site,” explained Beatport spokesperson Rudolf Aengus, “as new genre names are being thought up by journalists all the time so it’s difficult for the average user to keep up.”
The move has been widely heralded as the most user friendly optimisation that Beatport have ever done and every user
“I actually don’t really care what genre a song I like goes under, it could be tropical house, garage-EDM or soulful techno, the only deciding arbiter for me is if it’s either good or shit,” claimed London based DJ Frank K. “I’m excited to avoid trawling through hours of crap to find gems.”
Some acts that are guaranteed to endure declassification into the “shit” category under the new rules include “anyone on the milky teat of commercial EDM like Martin Garrix, Tiesto and Steve Aoki”.
“I’m not happy that they’ve done away with the traditional categories,” raged Aoki, “it was the only thing that was helping to pass off the derivative, thoughtless noise I consider music as anything other than the shit it so plainly is. If I can’t mistakenly call it progressive house then I can’t sell it.”
Most working club DJs and fans of proper dance music are delighted with the move however as it chimes with most people’s categorisation of music.
“I think it’s fantastic, I’ve been DJing for years and have quite a good grasp on what is good but struggle to tell what I might like out of all the genres when I’m digging,” continued Frank. “Normally I’d have to look at the names of the DJs and labels to see if they’re credible, proper artists but that takes time to learn, now I can just glance if it’s good or shit and go about the day.”
Beatport claim they’ll make it even easier to use the new system with plans to incorporate a colour coded tag next to each track, brown for shit and green for good.
“You won’t mistakenly run the risk of downloading a shit track just cause it was labelled deep house,” explained Aengus. “All it’ll take is a quick glance to see what colour the track is and you can avoid it.”
In order to avoid any lobbying for inclusion in the good category Beatport have hired a ten-year-old child to listen to each track included and make a judgement on it.
“Our belief is that anyone with a rudimentary standard of hearing will be able to quickly determine what’s good and what’s shit. The fact that we chose a ten-year-old child is purely to make him incorruptible by callous labels as he doesn’t know what blowjobs are and would probably hate nightclubs.
The new categories are expected to come into effect within the next month.
