Music genres for dummies: lists and explanations
Folk rock, speed metal, dubstep, turborock, pop punk, k-pop, electro, noise, ambient, alt country, college rock, prog, blues, techno, post rock, new age... have you ever felt lost in the ever-growing ocean of music genres? Well, don’t worry: it’s the most normal thing that can happen when dealing with the multifaceted, complicated universe of genres and sub-genres.
Let’s start from the beginning. What is a music genre? It can be easily explained thinking about it as a big category, usually encompassing many different types of music, but with a common background. So, for instance: rock is a main genre, but under this definition we include many sub-genres, or different styles/types of rock... such as punk, indie, shoegaze, AOR, metal and many, many more.
Sub-genres are particularly useful to describe better the sound of bands and artists and they are – often – invented or conceived by music critics and journalists to write about bands (just to name an example: the term “heavy metal”, according to many, was invented by legendary rock critic Lester Bangs).
It seems pretty easy, but the problem is that, over time, the distinct guidelines defining single genres and their sub-genres get blurred as new forms of music come up. So this is not an exact science and the scenario is subject to changes in the short span of a few years.
A pretty detailed list of the most popular and established main genres, at the moment, is as follows:
alternative
anime
blues
children’s music
classical
comedy
country
dance
Disney
easy listening
electronic
enka
French pop
German folk
German pop
fitness & workout
hip-hop/rap
holyday
indie pop
industrial
inspirational – Christian & gospel
instrumental
jazz
K-pop
karaoke
kayokyoku
Latino
new age
opera
pop
r&b/soul
reggae
rock
singer/songwriter
soundtrack
spoken word
Tex-Mex/Tejano
vocal
world
Most of these main genres have, then, many sub-genres – for instance, blues can be acoustic blues, Chicago blues, classic blues, contemporary blues, country blues, Delta blues and electric blues. And what about rock? Well, things are even harder here, with AOR, American trad rock, arena rock, blues-rock, British invasion, death metal, black metal, glam rock, hair metal, hard rock, heavy metal, jam bands, prog-rock, art rock, psychedelic, rock & roll, rockabilly, roots rock, Southern rock, surf...
If you want to dig deeper in the classifications, you can try reading the full list provided by the website musicgenreslist.