The contemporary Christian music landscape sprawls across a genre taxonomy that secular music databases handle poorly. A gospel hip-hop album from Nigeria sits next to an indie rock worship EP from Portland in a flat alphabetical list with no structure to distinguish them — same genre field, different worlds. And the YouTube link to that live Elevation Worship session from 2019 that you've returned to thirty times exists only in a browser bookmark that you'll lose in the next phone migration.
A music library built for this specific space needs a classification system that acknowledges how wide the genre actually is.
Two-Axis Classification for a Wide Genre
The Genres field — Rock, Hip Hop, Pop, Blues — is the primary frame. Styles runs beneath it with more granular options: Grunge, Pop Rap, RnB/Swing, Pop Rock, Blues Rock, Alternative Rock, Garage Rock, Lo-Fi, Indie Rock.
Both fields are multi-select. A DC Talk album from 1995 fits Hip Hop and Rock, and the style is closer to Pop Rap and Alternative Rock depending on the track. TobyMac's Hits Deep is Pop, Hip Hop, and Pop Rap simultaneously. Forcing a single genre selection onto albums that intentionally blurred genre lines produces a catalogue that can't be sorted meaningfully. Two multi-select fields let the classification reflect reality.
Country is the field most music databases don't prioritize, but for Christian music it matters more than it does in secular genres. South African gospel, Nigerian gospel, Caribbean praise music, and Australian worship pop share the Christian classification but have almost nothing in common sonically or culturally. A Country filter on a 200-album database surfaces regional listening patterns you didn't know you had.
The Provenance Fields
Label captures the publishing entity — Sparrow Records, Integrity Music, Centricity, Reach Records — which for Christian music correlates strongly with production quality, theological emphasis, and genre positioning. A Reach Records release and a Maranatha! Music release are both Christian hip-hop and traditional worship respectively, and the label field makes that legible without reading descriptions.
Year, Format (Digital, CD, 12" Vinyl), and Barcode together document the physical and digital collection. The barcode field enables the same scan-to-catalog workflow as any other collection database — point the camera at the CD case UPC and the record is identified instantly.
Cover stores album art. In a visual browse of a large library, the cover art is the fastest recognition trigger — faster than reading titles, faster than artist names. A music database without cover art is a list. With it, it's a collection.
The Personal Layer
My rating on a 5-point scale and Youtube URL are the two fields that convert a catalogue from inventory to curated library.
The YouTube link is the listening access point. When a friend asks you about an artist you've catalogued, you don't describe it — you pull up the record and hand them the link. The Tracks field and Track count give you the tracklisting reference for albums you own physically but listen to digitally.
The rating field becomes meaningful at scale. Filter for My rating = 5 across 200 albums and you have your own curated best-of list, sorted however you want. Sort by Year and you have a chronological journey through what moved you most. Sort by Country and you have a geography of the music. None of that requires anything beyond the fields already in the record.