Engagement

We chose open source so genre data, software, and project history stay inspectable, reusable, and community-owned. Proprietary silos make it hard to verify claims or build on each other’s work; public repositories and licenses let anyone audit, fork, and improve the ecosystem without asking permission from a single gatekeeper.

That choice also shapes how we collaborate: issues and roadmaps in the open, contributions reviewed on their merits, and documentation that lives next to the code. The BehindTheMusicTree organization on GitHub is the hub; Contribuer explains how to take part.

Discover culture through exhaustive genre cartography. We treat the map of genres as a living chart: the more complete and precise it is, the easier it becomes to explore how music travels, splits, and reconnects across places and eras. Breadth and depth in that cartography are how listeners and researchers actually find their way into real cultural context—not only a handful of familiar labels.

Keep it crowd-sourced so communities hold the power. The reference is built in the open: proposals, review, and debate happen where contributors can see them. That shifts agency toward the people who live the music—scenes, archivists, educators, and enthusiasts—instead of locking decisions inside a single proprietary product.

Represent every culture—established and emerging. When the map is community-owned and ambitious in scope, widely known traditions sit alongside emerging and local forms that rarely get a fair slot in closed catalogs. The goal is a cartography where each culture can show up with the nuance it deserves, including what is still taking shape today.

Contribuer outlines how to take part in that map; Projets links the tools that turn shared data into discovery in practice.