Most musicians don’t like being classified. I think it’s because every musician likes to think they’re a beautiful and unique snowflake, not possibly part of a fashionable zeitgeist. But unless you’re leading the fashion movement, classification helps potential fans find you. These days, without record store clerk oracles, we have to use goofy data mining applications to try to infer classification.

Electronic music is particularly resistant to classification, either because of the structure of the music itself or the scene it’s produced in. DJs generally play particular styles, so they have to be constantly going through newly produced tracks looking for suitable pieces. This obscurity creates an effect where the best DJs aren’t the best at composing a set or reading a venue but at filtering through haystacks.

Being an insatiable modernist, I love classifying things. But I don’t know enough about music to understand a definition like:

breakbeat n. electronic music characterized by a non-straightened 4/4 drum pattern, syncopation and polyrhythm

So in trying to understand and explore the field of electronic music, I was quite happy to come across this genre-genealogy diagram with samples and commentary. The commentary is highly opinionated and doesn’t explain much about what’s different between genres (but it’s funny!), so you only get the structural context of a genre – but if that’s enough for mathematics it should be enough for music. (It’s unfortunately Flash-based, but that was a reasonable way to present samples back in 2000 when the first version was authored – by a guy from Delta!)