Your musical spectrum?

[Skummy]

I find this really difficult - for reasons similar to metalman. On one hand, it's easy to say "Oh, I've got a ton of extreme metal, but I've also got a Kate Nash album and some Lady GaGa"...but are they really polar opposites? Obviously they're very different, but they're both created broadly within the pop idiom, and it's only the fans of the likes of extreme metal that like to insist otherwise and assume that their music is completely apart from "the mainstream".

It's pretty much impossible to choose just one extreme at either end, because you can always find crossover. Extreme metal and avant-garde metal have a habit of crossing over into jazz and vice-versa - John Zorn and his collaborations with the likes of Mike Patton come to mind. "Classical" music could be said to be far removed from the majority of pop and rock-based genres, but obviously that's not true either. I thought I'd find this really easy, but it's impossible for me to choose one end of a "spectrum".

Using metalman's example then;

Commercial to non-commercial: I've got albums by Kate Nash, Gnarls Barkley, Paloma Faith, Lily Allen, Pink and huge amounts of Phil Spector girl pop, just to name some "commercial" stuff off the top of my head, but at the non-commercial end of the spectrum, I've got stuff by unsigned bands that probably no one's heard, but then that's not necessarily a sound thing as many of them have every intention of being commercial, they just haven't got there yet, so really I don't think this is a viable "spectrum", I'm just including it because MM did.

"Mainstream sound": Pretty much what I put for commercial, pop stuff. As for non-mainstream, anything from the likes of Sainkho Namtchylak, Runhild Gammelsæter and Tanya Taqaq's vocal experimentation that will almost certainly never be "mainstream", to the likes of SunnO))) (who in the context of what they're doing are ridiculously mainstream), experimental and free jazz stuff like Sun Ra, John Zorn, Ornette Coleman etc., 20th century "classical" avant-garde music like John Cage...I could go on and on. As the two polar opposites, though? Let's say Lily Allen and SunnO))).

Old to new: Well, new would be whatever I buy from the new releases displays on a weekly basis or what I might download this afternoon, obviously "newest" changes all the time. Oldest...possibly some classical stuff, maybe some early jazz, blues, folk and country recordings.

[hackerjack]

More of a sphere than a single line I think, here's some of the stuff that probably touches the edges of my collection in one way or another.

Gustav Holst

Death Quit Dancing

Jean Michel Jarre

Public Enemy

Fantazia III: Made In Heaven

Christina Aguilera (even the earlier sugar coated stuff)

Metallica

Justin Haywood: Classic Blue

BT

Katherine Jenkins

S Club 7

War of the Worlds

Sophie Madekaine: Love.live.ukelele

And pretty much a couple hundred more in between.