How many music genres are there? [Bobby Owsinski]

How many music genres are there? Hint: A LOT more than you think…

by Bobby Owsinski of Music 3.0

One of the things that’s particularly hard for artists and bands to determine is what genre their music fits into. The fact is that if you’re doing it well it probably fits into several, or none at all. That said, Spotify has tried to cover just about every genre from every part of the world that you can think of, and it’s constantly adding new ones. To show you how much its music genres have changed, here’s a list of differences in the top 25 genres between 2016 and 2023, thanks to pudding.cool. The new genres are outlined in blue.

Almost half of these are music genres are specific to Latin, Korean, or Hindi music, which makes sense, since so many of Spotify’s users are now from these parts of the world.

Another thing that’s interesting is that K-pop is now ranked higher than either R&B or EDM, which now don’t even rank in the top 25, and reggaeton is now #7.

The fact is that there are over 6,000 genres in the Spotify database. These are just some of them:

Florida drill, chill phonk, and Minnesota metal are just a few here that make you scratch your head, but actually, that’s probably true for all of them.

The problem is that I bet that most of these genres are not too deep in users. That means that if you identify exclusively with a micro-genre then you might get overlooked in a search because a listener isn’t even aware that the genre exists in the first place. 

So which genre do you choose for your music?

Luckily, there’s an Ai for that. You can go to the Music Genre Finder to get some help with this question. I’m not sure how well it works, but it’s better than trying to wade through 6,000 sub-genres to find the perfect match for your music.

On the other hand, you can just stay with an all-encompassing genre like rock, r&b, hip hop, jazz, etc. to make your life easy.

Bobby Owsinski is a producer/engineer, author, blogger, podcaster, and coach. He has authored 24 books on recording, music, the music business and social media.