Welcome to the Genres hub on Musicngear! Here you’ll find a wide range of music genres and their subgenres - each one a gateway to tailored gear recommendations, the latest news, fresh music, curated playlists, and a passionate community. Click on the styles you love and start exploring!
Ambient
Blues
Blues is a vocal and instrumental form of music based on the use of “blue notes.” It emerged in Black communities of the United States from spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts and chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads. The use of blue notes and the prominence of call-and-response patterns in the music and lyrics are indicative of African influence. “Blue notes,” also known as “worried notes,” are the typically flattened third, fifth, and seventh degrees in a major scale. This is what gives the blues its inherent minor tonality. From performer to performer, or from blues genre to genre, e.g., country blues, the deviation of the “blue note” from the actual scale can be greater. The blues influenced much of later American and Western popular music. It became one of the roots of jazz, rhythm and blues, and bluegrass. During the 1960s and 1970s, a hybrid form of the blues, blues rock, developed by combining of blues with various rock and roll forms.
Classical
Opera is an art form in which singers and musicians perform a dramatic work (called an opera) which combines a text (called a libretto) and a musical score. Opera is part of the Western classical music tradition. Opera incorporates many of the elements of spoken theatre, such as acting, scenery and costumes and sometimes includes dance. The performance is typically given in an opera house, accompanied by an orchestra or smaller musical ensemble. Opera started in Italy at the end of the 16th century (with Jacopo Peri’s lost Dafne, produced in Florence around 1597) and soon spread through the rest of Europe: Heinrich Schütz in Germany, Jean-Baptiste Lully in France, and Henry Purcell in England all helped to establish their national traditions in the 17th century. However, in the 18th century, Italian opera continued to dominate most of Europe, except France, attracting foreign composers such as Georg Friedrich Händel. Opera seria was the most prestigious form of Italian opera, until Christoph Willibald Gluck reacted against its artificiality with his “reform” operas in the 1760s. Today the most renowned figure of late 18th century opera is Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who began with opera seria but is most famous for his Italian comic operas, especially The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Così fan tutte, as well as The Magic Flute, a landmark in the German tradition. The first third of the 19th century saw the highpoint of the bel canto style, with Gioacchino Rossini, Gaetano Donizetti and Vincenzo Bellini all creating works that are still performed today. It also saw the advent of Grand Opera typified by the works of Meyerbeer. The mid to late 19th century is considered by some a golden age of opera, led by Richard Wagner in Germany and Giuseppe Verdi in Italy. This ‘golden age’ developed through the verismo era in Italy and contemporary French opera through to Giacomo Puccini and Johann Strauss II in the early 20th century. During the 19th century, parallel operatic traditions emerged in Central and Eastern Europe, particularly in Russia and Bohemia. The 20th century saw many experiments with modern styles, such as atonality and serialism (Arnold Schönberg and Alban Berg), Neo-Classicism (Igor Stravinsky), and Minimalism (Philip Glass and John Adams). With the rise of recording technology, singers such as Enrico Caruso became known to audiences beyond the circle of opera fans. Operas were also performed on (and written for) radio and television.
Country
Country music is a broad term, covering a great many styles of music predominantly created in the United States of America - however there are growing traditions of country music elsewhere, particularly in Canada and Australia and Njgeria Country music is generally characterized by its use of the guitar and its heavily-accented vocals describing life’s hardships. A common joke runs that if one plays a country song backwards, the singer’s child recovers from an illness, he gets his job back, his wife returns to him and his dog isn’t run over by a car. Common lyrical themes deal with cowboys and other anti-heroes, often presented as common men and women just trying to make it through the day. Country music was an influence on early rock music, along with blues, jazz, and gospel. Many different varieties of country music have arisen over the years, from the slick production of the Nashville sound to the rougher edges of outlaw country. There have been several cycles from periods of experimentation and fusion with other genres giving way to returns to traditionalism and back again. Recently, there has been a great deal of crossover between country and pop, beginning with Shania Twain in the mid-1990s and continuing through to Carrie Underwood and Taylor Swift. On the other hand, there is also a loosely-defined group of alt-country artists operating outside the mainstream of country and incorporating influences from other genres ranging from folk to punk.
Dance
Dance music is music composed specifically to facilitate or accompany dancing. It can be either a whole musical piece or part of a larger musical arrangement. In terms of performance, the major categories are live dance music and recorded dance music. Dance music works often bear the name of the corresponding dance, e.g. waltzes, the tango, the bolero, the can-can, minuets, salsa, various kinds of jigs and the breakdown. Often it is difficult to know whether the name of the music came first or the name of the dance. Nowadays, The term “dance music” is often used for more commercial forms of electronic music. It is also associated as any form of music is danced to, spanning genres of pop, hip-hop, house, techno, disco, electro and so on.
Electronic
Electronic music refers to music that emphasizes the use of electronic musical instruments or electronic music technology as a central aspect of the sound of the music. Historically, electronic music was considered to be any music created with the use of electronic musical instruments or electronic processing, but in modern times, that distinction has been lost because almost all recorded music today, and the majority of live music performances, depend on extensive use of electronics. Today, the term electronic music serves to differentiate music that uses electronics as its focal point or inspiration, from music that uses electronics mainly in service of creating an intended production that may have some electronic elements in the sound but does not focus upon them. Contemporary electronic music expresses both art music forms including computer music, experimental music, musique concrète, and others; and popular music forms including multiple styles of dance music such as techno, house, trance, electro, breakbeat, drum and bass, synth pop, etc. A distinction can be made between instruments that produce sound through electromechanical means as opposed to instruments that produce sound using electronic components. Examples of electromechanical instruments are the telharmonium, Hammond organ, and the electric guitar, whereas examples of electronic instruments are a Theremin, synthesizer, and a computer.
Folk
Funk
Hip Hop
Hip hop is a musical genre which developed alongside hip hop culture, defined by key stylistic elements such as rapping, DJing, sampling, scratching and beatboxing. Hip hop began in the Bronx in New York City in the 1970s, primarily among African Americans and Jamaican Americans, with some Latino influences. The term rap is often used synonymously with hip hop, but hip hop denotes the practices of an entire subculture. Hip hop arose when DJs began isolating the percussion break from funk or disco songs for audiences to dance to. It is now seen as a worldwide and popular genre ranging from American Mainstream (e.g. Eminem, Lil Wayne) to British Undergound (e.g. Wiley, EMC Junkie etc)
Jazz
Jazz is a musical art form which originated around the beginning of the 20th century in Black communities in the Southern United States from a confluence of African and European music traditions. The style’s West African pedigree is evident in its use of blue notes, call-and-response, improvisation, polyrhythms, syncopation, and the swung note of ragtime. From its early development until the present, jazz has also incorporated music from 19th and 20th century American popular music, which is based on European music traditions. The word jazz began as a West Coast slang term of uncertain derivation and was first used to refer to music in Chicago in about 1915. Jazz has, from its early 20th century inception, spawned a variety of subgenres, from New Orleans Dixieland dating from the early 1910s, big band-style swing from the 1930s and 1940s, bebop from the mid-1940s, a variety of Latin-jazz fusions such as Afro-Cuban and Brazilian jazz from the 1950s and 1960s, jazz-rock fusion from the 1970s and later developments such as acid jazz.
Latin
Latin American music or Latin music encompasses rhythms and styles originated or related to Latin America and its influence in the United States and several European countries such as Spain or Portugal. Some critics have defined Latin music as an incorporation of four elements: music style, geography, cultural background of the artist and language. The first of those encapsulates all music styles generated from Latin countries, such as salsa, merengue, tango, bossa nova and bachata; as well as other styles derived from a more mainstream genre, such as Latin pop, rock, jazz and Reggaeton. Geographically, it usually refers to the Spanish and Portuguese-speaking regions of Latin America but sometimes include Francophone countries of Latin America as well. The origins of Latin music begins with Spain and Portugal’s colonization of Latin America in the 16th century. Latin American music is performed in Spanish, Portuguese, and to a lesser extent, French. As a popular genre in the music industry, it is used to describe any Spanish or Portuguese-language genre including those from Spain and Portugal.
Metal
“Heavy metal” (often referred to simply as metal) is a subgenre of rock music that developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s. With roots in blues-rock and psychedelic rock, the bands that created heavy metal developed a thick, massive sound, characterized by highly amplified distortion and extended guitar solos. Allmusic states that “of all rock & roll’s myriad forms, heavy metal is the most extreme in terms of volume, machismo, and theatricality.” Heavy metal has long had a worldwide following of fans known as “metalheads” or “headbangers”. Although early heavy metal bands such as Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, and Deep Purple attracted large audiences, they were often critically reviled at the time, a status common throughout the history of the genre. In the mid-1970s, Judas Priest helped spur the genre’s evolution by discarding much of its blues influence. Bands in the New Wave of British Heavy Metal such as Iron Maiden and Motörhead followed in a similar vein, introducing a punk rock sensibility and an increasing emphasis on speed. In the mid-1980s, pop-infused glam metal became a major commercial force with groups like Mötley Crüe. Underground scenes produced an array of more extreme, aggressive styles: thrash metal broke into the mainstream with bands such as Metallica, also leading the development of more extreme styles, such as death metal and black metal, which remain subcultural phenomena. alternative metal later followed these, as a reaction to both: being more accessible than the extreme styles typified by death metal (while not as overtly commercial as hair metal) while also being musically varied and sonically adventurous. Since the mid-1990s, popular styles such as nu metal, which often incorporates elements of funk and hip hop; and metalcore, which blends extreme metal with hardcore punk, have further expanded the definition of the genre. Other subgenres of metal include power metal, speed metal, melodic death metal (also known as Gothenburg metal), Industrial metal, nu-metal, thrash metal, black metal, doom metal, death metal, progressive metal and folk metal.
Pop
“Pop music” is a broad-term for many different types of music: The term is flexible, and the music labeled “pop” changes frequently. It does, however, usually refer to popular, mainstream music with emphasis on a catchy melody and accessible style.
R&B
Reggae
Reggae is a music genre first developed in Jamaica in the late 1960s. While sometimes used in a broader sense to refer to most types of Jamaican music, the term reggae more properly denotes a particular music style that originated following on the development of ska and rocksteady. Reggae is based on a rhythm style characterized by regular chops on the off-beat, known as the skank. The tempo is generally slower than that found in ska. Reggae is often associated with the Rastafari movement, an influence on many prominent reggae musicians from its inception. Reggae song lyrics deal with many subjects, including faith, love, sexuality, relationships, poverty, injustice and other broad social issues.
Rock
Classic rock was originally conceived as a radio station programming format which evolved from the album oriented rock (AOR) format in the early-1980s. In the United States, this rock music format now features a large playlist of songs ranging from the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s, with some stations including a limited number of current releases. The classic rock stations recreate the sound of Album Oriented Rock (AOR) stations of the 60s-90s (although usually with a much more limited playlist) and appeal mainly to adults, rather than teenagers. Some classic-rock stations also play a limited number of current releases which are stylistically consistent with the station’s sound, such as fitting the vibe of the other rock music.
