Quote Originally Posted by Lawrence001 View Post
I think you need to split out pop, rock and folk it's too wide a genre range. Or is that just one CD by the band 1975?
There are two schools of thought regarding cataloguing records. Some will file them according to the artist's name in alphabetical order, regardless of genre. This has the advantage that one need not worry about genre or style, but what about duets - who's name comes first? "Page and Plant", or "Page" before "Plant"?

The other system is what I have followed for both my vinyl collection as well as for the CD collection; that of dividing the collection into genre, then within each genre by artist's name or ensemble name in alphabetical order. This seems to me to be more logical and natural. The problem is the size of the genre - and as you point out that my grouping of "Rock, Pop and Folk" is too large and needs splitting out. Frankly I'm not sure if there is an obvious division between Rock and Pop. The Beatles are obviously Pop, whereas The Rolling Stones are Rock, but I wouldn't separate them. There is a problem where an artist's early work may be in one genre, but later segues or moves into another.

In my vinyl collection Folk was a separate genre, but there were some difficulties with artists such as John Martyn, or Joni Mitchell. Martyn's early work was definitely acoustic Folk. Then later he started to play an electric guitar, and with the addition of a Echoplex echo effects pedal his playing started to move more towards rock. Later in teaming up with Danny Thompson, on double bass, the music moved into jazz, especially when John deliberately slurred his singing. Similarly Joni Mitchell started off as an acoustic folk artist. Later she started to move towards folk pop and then to jazz (around the time of her LP 'Mingus'). Soft Machine started as an experimental pop group, then moved towards jazz and ending there.

So no one system is perfect, you just have to use one which seems 'right' for you.