eartifacts is a small, informal museum of musical artifacts; in particular, the museum is a museum of articles, each one of which informally analyzes a single song/track/composition. The focus is on “popular music” (in the broad sense of “anything that is neither folk music nor ‘classical’ music”). eartifacts is far from being the first literature to focus on popular music: there exists plenty of scholarly (and not scholarly) popular music literature out there in journals, magazines, websites, &c. However, eartifacts is considerably different in a number of ways.

In eartifacts articles, the concept of musical genre is occasionally used, sometimes to organize artifacts and sometimes as a convenient way to make certain comments. Naturally, genre is a slippery concept at best; it is taken as given that only broad generalizations can be made, and therefore any attempt to precisely define genre(s) is guaranteed to fail. The use of genre is predicated entirely on how useful it is in very particular situations, that is, it is considered to be completely non-normative. This article attempts to clarify how the genre concept is used by eartifacts.