I like to know the year when an album was composed and played.
Typically, the composer and/or players will have been influenced by those who went before them and so the year of composition and performance can tell you a lot.
It also amazes and delights me how good recordings often are from 50, 60, 70, 80 years ago or more.
I assume you mostly mean in the context of Classical music? Other genres like rock, country, blues etc, have originals and cover versions of course, but Iāve never really had any interest in the chronology of those so much as whoās version I think is best and whoās was the original (which you just need to look up because chances are you donāt have every version of a song to determine which was the original).
I can imagine how it might makes sense for Classical musicā¦ of which I own none. Which in itself raises an interesting point yet again about genres. Can we even define Classical music. Iāve said I own known but I have entirely orchestral albums - does that alone make them Classical? I feel like it doesnāt but itās a tough call.
j agree with @anon77199223 - i file music and books cronologically and really enjoy the unexpected juxtapositions that throws up. i find filing alphabetically doesnāt yield interesting connections - tho i admit it can make finding things easier
When I had physical media, after primary filing order of my basic genre then artist, for non-classical I filed each artistās albums in date order as that made most sense to me, keeping their releases in order. With āelectronicā media I actually put the year in the file title, making sense to do that in case I forget release order. But writing this I realise that illogically I havenāt been putting the date at the front, so they donāt file in order!
Other than for filing, I have found the release date of value when discovering artists new to me, as very commonly I find artists have a limited period of good creativity, or at least which is to my taste, so if I discover an album I like by an artist new to me, who has a catalogue spanning many years, I will investigate their releases more or less chronologically forwards and backwards from the one that introduced me.
I donāt file my collection at all.
I donāt even group by artist. I just chuck them on the shelves in sort of 4 very broad categories. My NAS takes care of filing, but I let it do that alphabetically. If I want to play a CD or a record, I just browse until my finger runs over something that intrigues me.
This just shows how our brains are all wired differently: when I had physical media there is no way I wouldāve coped with it all being randomly arranged! Fine when I first had only a dozen or two albums, but certainly not once grown into the hundreds! I often know exactly what I want to play when I go to play music and just want to go to it and pick it up and play it. And whether or not I start with a definite idea of what to play, usually the next album to play comes into my head while Iām playing the previous one. On the less frequent occasions when I donāt have a prior desire for something in particular, and just want to browse, I just start at some random position in the collection and flick along in one direction of other until something caught my eye I will just go up to some random point in the shelves and flick along, or if I want something really random I just close my eyes and stab a finger, but that is extremely rare.
With streaming of music files, although my library/player software orders it alphanumerically for me, everything is still methodically filed on the drive so that I can access anything through the filing system should I ever want to, or sometime in the future if I have a player with the delightful advantage of searching by file structure.
Winners was a poor choice as you say. That last line looks a bit harsh mindst 
Oops!!! Hopefully long beforeā¦ Duly corrected now.
I have had my albums filed alphabetically since I got to around 50 LPs. I ignored āTheā in the band name and filed artists by their last name. My digital collection is filed by Naimās app and the āTā section is enormous and every solo artist is filed alphabetically by their first name. I suspect I am going to have to re-order my LPs to get them to match. At the moment from the top of my head, only Liz Lawrence and Billy Bragg are under the same letter in the alphabet in my digital and analogue collections.
My approach to filing was the same. And indeed that is exactly how Iāve now got electronic music files stored, with no leading ātheā and surnames first. The music player that went purely by file structure would be perfect because it will then be totally within my control and logic would prevail.
Asset does let you do that. Especially if you combine it with dbpoweramp tag plugin.
I might choose to organise differently from you but I do it by file structure.
Asset gives you complete control over the heirarchy of tags used to present your collection. I use Minimserver too because one streamer explicitly only supports it. It can do the same but Asset is a bit simpler.
I voted for four of the available genres: Rock, Blues, Folk and Jazz.
My āother genreā would probably be defined as āNew Ageā with artists such as Govi, David Arkenstone, Michael Hedges and William Ackerman amongst others. An occasional guilty pleasure as background music or when I just want to chill out with a cup of good coffee or beer late at night!
Voted Other so here goes:
Electronic (Trance, Psy-Trance, Ambient)
Pagan Folk (Would not sleep if I included that in the broader Folk category)
Lounge
New Age
Metal
Slowcore
Alternative
What pagan folk do you enjoy? Faun? Wardruna? Or something else?
I just checked on Wikipedia. There are more than 500 musical genres ( with sub genres).
I am listening maybe to a dozen of them : jazz, jazz rock, jazz fusion, soul jazz, jazz funk, modern jazz, blues, rock, pop, soul , funk, alternative.
Yeah I love Faun and enjoy Wardruna as well.
Some of the other bands matching the genre or related that I enjoy are:
Heilung
Danheim
Heldom
Garmarna
Songleikr
Skald
Corvus Corax
Emian
Sowulo
TVINNA
Iād hazard to say that Heilung is currently my favourite band overall. The Lifa Lotungard video on YouTube is a must watch.
Thanks! Heilung performed at Glastonbury this year. I watched on television. I donāt know if you would class Dionysus by Dead Can Dance as pagan folk? I play this a lot.
Maybe that helps clarify why I went for a limited number!
I listen a lot more on music than most people done for last 10-20 years or so. Lets say it is a fair part of my time being awake. I guess I listen about 60-80 % of that time to progressive trance. Artists like TiĆ«sto, Paul van Dyk, ATB, Armin van Bureen but also smaller artists in this genre like Super8 & Tab or Temple One. I prefer the tracks from about the start of millenium to later 00s. Except that, I rather have preference of songs rather than genres. It can be from the radio, it can be from friends or I found online. Or if I suddenly remember some song, or hear a song in a movie. It can be almost ANY genre from commersial and modern pop to shoegaze, trip-hop, chiptunes, jazz, classical, film music. Music from any time, anywhere. There are also lot of music I am not a big fan of, like Swedish ādansbandā, folkmusic, many cheesy popsongs. I would say second preference after progressive trance would be alternative rock or new wave from 80ās 90s. Artists like Garbage or Depeche Mode.
