Genre in Practice
Categories, Metadata and Music-Making in Psytrance Culture
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2020.12.01.09Abstract
Digital technology has changed the way in which genre terms are used in today’s musical cultures. Web 2.0 services have given musicians greater control over how their music is categorised than in previous eras, and the tagging systems they contain have created a non-hierarchical environment in which musical genres, descriptive terms, and a wide range of other metadata can be deployed in combination, allowing musicians to describe their musical output with greater subtlety than before. This article looks at these changes in the context of psyculture, an international EDM culture characterised by a wide vocabulary of stylistic terms, highlighting the significance of these changes for modern-day music careers. Profiles are given of two artists, and their use of genre on social media platforms is outlined. The article focuses on two genres which have thus far been peripheral to the literature on psyculture, forest psytrance and psydub. It also touches on related genres and some novel concepts employed by participants (”morning forest” and ”tundra”).
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g. post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal. Such derivate works or subsequent publications must happen no less than one calendar year after the initial publication date in Dancecult.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g. in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).