I’m extremely picky about how I organize my music library. My obsession with classification began with iLounge‘s tutorials section and continued with Macworld‘s “The iTunes Guy” column. Those articles taught me the technical ins and outs of iTunes, which in turn showed me how to achieve the most precise organization possible. They also created a monster.
My organization system has become increasingly complex over the years. Things get particularly complicated when it comes to my Japanese and Korean music. As I mentioned when I discussed my 2017 iTunes play counts, J-Pop and K-Pop make up roughly half of my music. I spend a lot of time making sure that every song and album is labeled and filed appropriately.
To give you an idea of how fussy I am, I’m going to share how I set the genres and subgenres for my J-Pop and K-Pop songs.
Finding the Genre
My first step when I get new music is to determine the song’s genre. When I first began collecting international music, I categorized the songs by the artist’s home country. Therefore, music by a Japanese artist was J-Pop and music by a Korean artist was K-Pop.
As I collected more J-Pop and K-Pop music, however, I realized that my logic was shortsighted and inaccurate. After all, K-Pop artists frequently release music in Japanese, and several J-Pop artists have released music in English.
I had to rethink my system. Now, the song’s language determines its genre: a song sung in Japanese is J-Pop and a song in Korean is K-Pop. That method seems to work better.
Setting the Subgenre
I also have subgenres in my library. Subgenres come into play with English-language songs from J-Pop and K-Pop artists. In those cases, the song’s main genre defaults to Pop. Then I add a J-Pop or K-Pop subgenre to it according to the primary language the artist sings in.
Take the artist BoA. She sings in Japanese and English, but her primary language is Korean. So, her English-language songs are filed as Pop with a K-Pop subgenre. This way, I can hear her English songs on my K-Pop playlist and on my English playlist (which I play when I’m around J-Pop and K-Pop haters).
Other subgenres exist in my library as well. The biggest is Anime, which is reserved for the nearly 170 songs I have that were featured in an anime series or movie. Sometimes I even assign an extra subgenre for specific anime, such as IY for songs used in Inuyasha.
I classify my anime songs as J-Pop with an Anime subgenre. That designation stands even if the song isn’t sung in Japanese. I’m not going to create a new genre for a handful of songs that can easily fit into an existing one. Thus, Ilaria Graziano’s “I Do” and Origa’s “Inner Universe” from Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex are filed as J-Pop despite being performed in Italian and Russian respectively.
I’ve simplified my entire music library that way. That’s why Chinese Pop became Pop, J-Rock merged with J-Pop, and the Video Game Soundtrack subgenre no longer exists.
Exceptions to the Rules
Naturally, there have been a few instances where I’ve bent or broken my own rules.
First, I often question my language-as-a-genre rule when I have two versions of a song in different languages. Most of the time it’s business as usual. I file the songs based on their respective languages. But it’s not always that simple.
For example, I recently got the Japanese versions of some songs from the K-Pop band 2PM. I’m so much more familiar with the original Korean versions that I briefly considered filing them as K-Pop. It felt weird having the Japanese versions on my J-Pop playlist, especially since I don’t own the Korean versions. But I nixed that idea. Putting J-Pop in my K-Pop playlist would have defeated the purpose of having separate playlists.
Second, there’s one anime song that I didn’t file as J-Pop with an Anime subgenre: Utada Hikaru’s “Fly Me to the Moon” from the Evangelion movie. It is classified as Pop with J-Pop and Anime subgenres. This song is different from other anime songs because it’s a remake of an English song that was used in an anime, not an anime song that happens to be sung in English.
Non-Korean songs used in K-Dramas are generally filed as Pop for similar reasons as the Utada song, but Lasse Lindh’s “C’Mon Through” is another rare exception. That song was used repeatedly during key moments in the K-Drama Soulmate (one of my all-time faves). For me, it’s so intertwined with the show that I classified it as Pop with a K-Pop subgenre. Of course, that made slightly more sense when I still had a K-Drama subgenre in my library.
Conclusion
That’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to organizing my J-Pop and K-Pop songs. I have tons of other rules for things like song titles written in other alphabets and the proper order for Asian artist names. Please don’t judge me!
If you would like to learn more about my iTunes organizational methods, check out these other posts: