Falsehoods programmers believe about music genres
ID3 tags are the way metadata is attached to mp3 files. One field they allow you to define is the “genre” of a track. Hilariously, rather than making this a text filed, genre was expressed as… an integer between 0 and 255. This meant the whole of human music would need to be neatly subdivided into no more than 256 genres. What’s more, there was no standards body managing it, so whoever shipped a popular player which assigned these values a name, basically got to assign values in this narrow space unilaterally.
For example, values 142-191 were defined by Winamp developers.
Predictably this ended up with results that range from hilarious to horrible. Here are a few that made the cut and thus got enshrined:
178 Shoegaze
167 Industro-Goth
136 Christian Gangsta Rap
130 Terror
109 Porn groove
107 Booty Bass
48 Ethnic
108 Primus
133 Negerpunk
169 Krautrock
170 Leftfield
Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ID3
(The tile of this post is a play on Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names)