One of the key markers of a bona fide music nerd is an obsessive fascination with genres. It’s not enough to know that one likes a song or artist. One must know what musical lineages they draw from; how they fit into a complicated, amorphous and often arbitrary web of music categories.
As a music-obsessed teenager with a broadband connection, I spent hours arguing with strangers on bulletin boards about which Sonic Youth albums counted as no wave and which were alternative rock. I wrote manifestos about how Green Day weren’t “real punk”. And yet, as I look at some of the esoteric-sounding genres thrown up by this year’s Spotify Wrapped, I find myself wondering if maybe we’ve taken it all a bit too far.
Drift phonk, dark deepspy, POV: indie… they sound like random words mashed together, but these are among the thousands of sub-genres and micro-genres in use today. Spotify, for instance, sorts the 100,000 new tracks uploaded to the platform daily, into more than 6,000 overlapping categories.
Beyond the sounds they claim to represent, these tags tell an interesting story of artistry and perception. Take slung, a genre of emo-rap verse overlaid on aggressive, blown-out distortion and speaker-rattling bass. It has a handful of practitioners and a few thousand fans, most of them on SoundCloud.
Other micro-genres attain enough critical mass to get mainstream attention. Hyperpop — a maximalist, surrealist and internet culture-obsessed reimagining of pop music — became so popular thanks to artists such as AG Cook and 100 gecs that the Atlantic said it “could become the countercultural sound of the 2020s”.
As new artists use new technology to express themselves in new ways, the nicher the tag, the better. It helps them stand out, the micro-genres acting as tiny listening rooms on platforms such as SoundCloud, Discord and TikTok. And so the world of micro-genres is mutating, fragmenting and multiplying, evidenced by the fact the number of categories on Spotify has more than quadrupled in seven years; it stood at less than 1,500 in 2016.
Music micro-genres have been around since at least the 1970s, emerging as cheaper recording technology and the do-it-yourself scene led to a boom in music.
The older macro-genres — rock, pop, rap, jazz — were too broad to capture the full diversity of styles and sounds found in an average record store at this time, or represent the diverse fandoms they had birthed. So music critics — usually writing in the independent music press — began coining new terms. Such as freakbeat (a retrospective micro-genre coined by English music journalist Phil Smee, to define the crossover between 1960s R&B, beat and psychedelic music) and hauntology (Mark Fisher’s apt term for music that evokes cultural memory and historical aesthetics).
These terms became not just marketing classifications but social ones; markers of a specific community or subculture, with its own aesthetic and set of rules.
In today’s era of ubiquitous music-making technology, open digital platforms and effortless experimentation, new terms are vital once again. And genre-making is no longer the preserve of the label or critic. A small group of loosely connected artists — or sometimes even a single song — can generate so much online discussion that it becomes the locus of a small online community, linked by a shared interest in this particular approach to sound, instrument or aesthetic.
Some adopt ironic names such as crabcore and shitgaze, never dreaming that they will draw the attention of music critics and bloggers trying to feed the internet’s ravenous appetite for content. This can have interesting consequences.
Chillwave, for instance, was one of the first digital micro-genres to go mainstream. The name started out as an ironic joke. Carles, the pseudonymous writer of satirical music blog Hipster Runoff, coined it in 2009 to refer to the music of acts such as Neon Indian and Washed Out — dream-pop infused with a love for cheesy old synths, vintage drum machines and sepia-tinged summertime imagery. The term was meant to parody the amateurish, minutiae-obsessed style of the hipster music blogs of the time.
Missing the irony entirely, many of these blogs picked up the tag, at which point mainstream publications began to conduct fawning profiles of the micro-genre’s “leading artists”.
How does one ensure that a new genre name sticks? “It can’t be a reaction to just one band: there have to be at least three bands that you can build a legitimate argument around. But be ridiculous and be obvious,” a 24-year-old Carles would tell Wired two years later.
Anyway, the joke eventually soured. By 2014, chillwave was disavowed by its “leading artists”, and had become something of a cringe reminder of the excesses of the music blog era.
Even when the tag doesn’t start out as a joke, it can be hard to sustain a micro-genre in the glare of the mainstream. An influx of musical tourists can drive out its original community — which often came together over a shared love of weird, non-mainstream, outsider music. What usually follows is a flood of low-quality copycats who dilute the aesthetic. The bubble bursts, and the community moves on in search of the next quirky sound.
Hyperpop — the biggest micro-genre since chillwave — cemented its place in mainstream popular culture once Spotify launched a playlist of that name in 2019. Then an Atlantic article called it the “countercultural sound of the 2020s”. Six months later, in mid-2021, British hyperpop artist Charli XCX announced that the micro-genre was dead. In 2022, 16-year-old hyperpop star glaive said he was “working to kill the movement.” It had become a parody of itself, fans agreed on Reddit. The same backlash that had slain tags such as chillwave, witch house, seapunk and vaporwave had claimed another.
It is easy to see this as failure, as a boom-bust cycle of one-hit wonders. But perhaps that’s an artefact of older, pre-digital ways of thinking about music and genre. Perhaps it’s better to think of micro-genres as capturing a specific moment in internet culture. The names and aesthetic must change, but they’re all manifestations of the same radical idea: that music has the potential to include anyone (a sentiment never more true than now). Viewed from that perspective, blog house and dream plugg become different iterations of a truly democratic, continually evolving sound. Micro-genres die, but the micro-genre lives on.
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