The categorical imperative in popular music

Recent studies have found evidence for the existence of a 'categorical imperative'. Objects that do not unambiguously fit within the categories of their field pay a price: they are either ignored or devalued. In this article we examine whether this categorical imperative also applies to the classification of pop albums in genre categories and compare the effects of genre ambiguity within two (sub) fields of popular music. The results show that genre ambiguity has a negative effect within the commercial subfield, but a positive effect in the artistic subfield. This analysis confirms the theory of DiMaggio (1987), which argues that the boundary strength of classification systems varies between fields. Adapted from the source document.