Genre is Dying (and that's a good thing)

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[lukepurser]

They alway say they listen to everything, but no one listens to polka. Justice for polka.

[cranklabexplosion-labcentr]

Umm no.. in fact, this video is post-progressive technical blackened grind industrial noise soft-core….

[echtblikbonen]

This reminds me of how my mother's main playlists are titled "Fun" and "Car", which don't consider genre at all just what the playlist is supposed to be used for

[FamousByFriday]

I think you’re 98% right… the only thing you’re missing is the loss of community. It wasn’t solely antagonistic. I like live music… I’ve gone to a lot of Midwest emo, shoegaze, screamo, hardcore and punk shows and it’s like the same 50 people at every show. That creates a scene and scenes create new music. People bouncing ideas off each other, competing, and slowly progressing their music towards something. Without that community and with the internet, you get that progression, but it’s from anywhere without a historically natural progression… so an artist will have a pirate rock song then a merengue hip hop track… or whatever. Also… yeah, I noticed a few years back that the focus shifted from the artist and their art to the listener. I still listen to albums exclusively, because I like hearing the whole idea. Its importance has diminished greatly because a lot of artists write songs now, not albums, but… old habits. Now, with a few exceptions, it seems that the artist generally means nothing to people, just if they have a song that fits a playlist. Maybe thats part of the reason why we haven’t had the new bands be as successful as some of the legacy bands.

[AMoniqueOcampo]

Linda Martell said: "Genres are a funny little concept, aren't they?
Yes, they are
In theory, they have a simple definition that's easy to understand
But in practice, well, some may feel confined"

[dionysianarchitect]

Regarding the emergence of new genres, consider how technology lead to most of those new developments. Cheap guitars in the 50's led to rock'n'roll, turntables through the 70's-80's led to hip-hop, computers in the 80's-90's led to electronic music. Each of these genres adds a "letter" in the alphabet of music which can combine with any other to create new hybrids the same way 26 letters in English can combine into virtually infinite writings. I think we're also just on the cusp of electronic music truly evolving, it's still essentially in its infancy.

[readymade]

During the pandemic I made a playlist that I could use around my house and it had 2 rules: can I play the song around my kids and does the song compel me to groove? Growing up in the 80's/90's genre was a huge part of middle school and high school but if you looked at my CD binder (that's how old I am) you'd see Billy Joel sitting next to Metallica, Nirvana, Hootie and the Blowfish, John Coltrane and Tool. If I liked something I'd listen to it. When people ask me today "what kind of music do you listen to?" I say that I listen to anything; if I can groove to it then I'll give it a chance. Give hyperpop a chance, 100 Gecs, Charlie XCX, AG Cook were how I started.

[ThatOneGuyRAR]

As someone who listens to a lot of classical music, I’ve always found that the opus system of labeling is really convenient and works in a similar way that genre labels do. It relies on the audience having a lot of background knowledge (which genre does also) and uses that to give a lot of information about a piece of music before it’s even listened to. For example, I could see a name like “Alexander Scriabin’s Piano Concerto in F Sharp Minor, op. 20”, and rather than being given the information that it’s just “classical music”, which could mean anything, I know that it features a symphony orchestra with a piano soloist, it likely has 3 main divisions called “movements” which likely follow a “fast slow fast” pattern, it follows a line of Russian tradition, it’s likely late Romantic in style, and if I know a decent bit of stuff about Scriabin, I know that it’s written in his early period, which contains a lot of Chopin influence. It fulfills the same function of genre, but it can be clearly defined, and while you have to make guesses about what the music will be like beforehand, they can still be pretty well educated guesses.

[stitchedwithcolor]

I am firmly of the opinion that when people say "oh, i don't listen to X, it all sounds the same", what they mean isn't that--the human ear is a very sensitive instrument, of course we can distinguish sounds--but rather "there's a thing happening in X that doesn't work for me, and it happens consistently." I'd just like it if more people introspected a little and figured out what the thing is so i can make better recommendations.

[theigadwolf]

The reason for the common answer "a little bit of everything" is simply because today, Pop Music encompasses many genres. Pop Music is just a shortened form for Popular Music and that will include everything from Taylor Swift, The Weekend, Justin Bieber, or as much as the fans might hate to admit it bands like Slipknot or Metallica. If it shows up on the radio or in a Spotify top 100 playlist, it's pop(ular) music even if it might also falls into a more specific subgenre, metal, hip-hop, electronic, or traditional pop.

[mateusbez]

I've notice 3 things when discussing this with younger people:

- a group of "everything", which actually listens heavily to a lot of different stuff and it's awesome (not huge)

- a group of "everything" which listens to music as background noise all the time. This is a big group, and the "everything" is often a bunch of generic stuff.

- algorithm driven "super specifics". Like I met a 19 year old girl who loved shoegaze and listened to everything shoegaze in a line starting in the 80s and little else. The algorithm gives similar stuff, and in a very linear way.

[nickzardiashvili]

One useful reference here is Wittgenstein, who pondered on the act of categorization a lot. His example was not of genres but that of games and how would one define it. He'd find a definition of the word game, then come up with a counter example. The key takeaway for me, is that whatever categorization you make, you're the one making it. The genre is not inherent in the work itself, but reveals itself when we categorize it into that genre. On some occasions, the categorization can actually reveal more about the categoriser than about the thing categorized itself.

[rundoetx]

Nice take on rhe genre topic. I dont think genre, as a definition, is going away. Its still effective in a description mode. As a 71 year old, my music listening choices has always been eclectic and eccentric as opposed to most of my friends. But thats ok. Thanks for the video. I miss your informative and entertaining takes on music here on YouTube.

[christophermartin]

I think the importance of genre at this point is as a means of language. As a broad idea rather than a rigid set of checkboxes.

[faithfullyfaithless]

I'd argue genres are still important, and always will be. Sure, people may listen to a bit of everything moreso than previous generations, but when you find one thing in particular that really connects with you, having a genre is an essential signpost for finding similar music.

[BeamTheChao]

I'm definitely with you on the "playlist by feel" thing Poly. Since I was a little kid I'd pick what songs I wanted to listen to based on either how I was feeling or what daydream with my favorite fictional character I wanted to have that day (this is still true as a 31 yr old autistic woman). I'll group a bunch of different types of music together if I want an "early spring rainy day" feel, or a "spooky slightly haunted antique store" vibe, or even "the slightly sad feeling you get when you feel Fall coming after a great summer". Or "playlist for this specific anime character but only reflecting their feelings from this certain scene" lol.
I think instead of asking people "what genres do you like?" we should ask them "what are your favorite moods of music?"

[nothf]

As somebody who still primarily listens to music on physical media or purchased mp3s genre is most useful when it's like "Oh, you enjoy Crocodile Boy? You may also want to check out Alligator Lad." But I remember the 90s, I remember how cordoning yourself off into explicit subcultures really 1) divided people who otherwise would've gotten on just fine and 2) narrowed your own experience of great art. I was a punk/ska kid, took me a long time to get into hip hop even thought I *grew up during its golden age* so yeah I basically agree with the main takeaway here.

[timschulz]

I think genre has some advantages. It makes looking for similar music easier.

[pensivepenguin]

When I was a teenager in the 90s, me and my friends quietly judged people who said things like, “I listen to everything, ” or, “I listen to whatever is on the radio, ” because it seemed indecisive, like they didn’t have any real passion for music. Nowadays though, we all listen to everything. I started really noticing the breakdown of genre boundaries back in the MySpace days. That’s when I feel we started seeing lots of cross pollination

[bendowson]

Completely agree. I was born in 1992 and I so grew up in a time where genre was still a core part of how people defined their musical taste. Yet I have always struggled to answer the question "what music do you like?" because my music taste has always been based on qualities that don't neatly fit into genres. For example, two of my favourite songs are "Livin' on a Prayer" and "Heaven is a Place on Earth". I love both songs for very similar reasons and there are a lot of similarities between the songs, with the choruses having similar chord progressions, bass lines, overall melodic contours and production. Yet the first is labelled as hard rock and/or glam metal while the other is listed as pop rock even though, to me, Livin' on a Prayer is far more similar to Heaven is a Place on Earth than it is to, say You Shook Me All Night Long.