A Genre Map
Inspired by an email exchange with Samuel Richardson, creator of 'Know your genre' I created a genre map that might serve as a basis for a visual music explorer (perhaps something to build at one of the upcoming music hack days). The map is big and beautiful (in a geeky way). Here's an excerpt, click on it to see the whole thing.
Update - I've made an interactive exploration tool that lets you wander through the genre graph. See the Labyrinth of Genre
Update 2 - Colin asked the question "What's the longest path between two genres?" - If I build the graph by using the 12 nearest neighbors to each genre, find the minimum spanning tree for that graph and then find the longest path, I find this 31 step wonder:
Of course there are lots of ways to skin this cat - if I build the graph with just the nearest 6 neighbors, and don't extract the minimum spanning tree, the longest path through the graph is 10 steps: