(Only because I have an axe to grind) I really dislike "genre" and work hard to strip that metadata tag. It is so reductive. And flawed as well.
Do we assign a "genre" to an artist? Album? Song?
The band R.E.M.: "College Rock"? "New Wave"? "Alternative"?
(Wow, don't even get me started on all the ways you can further slice up "alternative" into "shoe-gaze", "twee", etc. It's, ha ha, naval gazing for the music intelligentsia.)
R.E.M.'s "Don't Go Back to Rockville"? "Country"?
I think "live" and "soundtrack" might be the only two interesting "genres".
More seriously, there’s no reason you can’t assign more than one genre to a song, or say that “it’s a mix of A and B”. You can extend the concept to albums and artists just as easily.
I’m not familiar with R.E.M., but on rateyourmusic.com they’re marked as alternative rock, jangle pop, pop rock, indie rock, neo-psychedelia, and folk rock. “Don’t go back to Rockville” is marked as Jangle pop, and the “Reckoning” album overall is mostly Jangle pop with some influences from post-punk and Paisley Underground.
You may not agree with these categorizations, but it’s a crowd-sourced website so you can go vote for different genres. You may also disagree with the existence of all of these genres, some of which I’ve never heard of myself (but as I said, I haven’t listened much to R.E.M. in general), but my point is more that if you’re familiar with them then you kind of know what to expect from the song.
I’d never heard “don’t go back to rockville”, but just from these genres you named to make your point, I already knew what it would approximately sound like. And indeed listening to it confirmed that.
RYM genres would be extremely useful to have as a beets autotag plugin and I've been waiting for years for their API to be opened up specifically for them.
Genres are fun to play with too. If something has breakdown and maybe some screams? Put 'core' at the end. Its all up to interpretation and it gives us some easy short hand to discuss music.
I don't think theres anything wrong with labelling genres, its good for describing things. If I say "I love post hardcore, does anyone have more of that?" its a lot easier than going "hear me I out, I like punk sounds but maybe not necessarily punk songs?" What about movies? Can books have a genre? seems like a silly thing to take issue with. Alternative is a huge umbrella and it means something very different now than it did in the 90's when it meant pavement or sonic youth.
'naval gazing for music intelligentsia' did a pitchfork writer run over your mom?
I Find it stupid for artists but helpful for albums. NB: I use RYM as source (via https://git.sr.ht/~q3cpma/rymscrap) for my extended metadata, gotta exploit that autism.
There are probably broad categories that I might find myself using, but for my own core collection of music (deeper than it is wide, mostly), it barely matters.
Do we assign a "genre" to an artist? Album? Song?
The band R.E.M.: "College Rock"? "New Wave"? "Alternative"?
(Wow, don't even get me started on all the ways you can further slice up "alternative" into "shoe-gaze", "twee", etc. It's, ha ha, naval gazing for the music intelligentsia.)
R.E.M.'s "Don't Go Back to Rockville"? "Country"?
I think "live" and "soundtrack" might be the only two interesting "genres".