Sub-genralise this!

I'm a huge fan of Radio 6. The great thing about it as a digital platform station is it doesn't need to follow the repetitive patterns and procedures of other radio broadcasters. Instead of plugging the latest commercial track of some random diamond-spattered "kooky" artist who auto-tuned it, so much, you'll know them personally by the day's end, the DJs sift through archives and archives of music history and pluck out the gems that shaped much of contemporary music, and the reputable current tracks spawned from such classics.

My foible isn't with Radio 6, it's with the shape of the music industry now. Steve Lamacq, Radio 6 DJ, casually throwing out the genre folktronica in association with Beth Orton, frustrated me slightly. Not because she isn't a folktronica artist (apparently she is), but because I couldn't successfully establish the difference between folktronica and electrofolk, or understand how I would describe to an acquaintance at a party what to expect when listening to either genre without sounding in the least bit pretentious, and immediately finding myself in a must-find-someone-else-to-alienate scenario.

Do we need sub-sub-sub-genres to categorise the music we enjoy? Surely music genres exist to enable us to easily locate the sort of sounds we could progress onto from our current life soundtracks, or to share simply with other people of a similar harmonic disposition.

And so, my new challenge is to see how sub-genralisation might work...introducing the folktronica typeface first. Classic western folk meets electronica fluorescent tubing!