Do you consider yourself highly aware of genres, meaning you can quickly and confidently label most pieces of music you hear with a genre? Do you think genre labels are generally good / useful / accurate, or do you think they can get too complex and detailed with subgenres and so on? Any other thoughts?

I used to be kinda like #DownWithGenreLabels lol, I'm definitely exaggerating but I did find them somewhat difficult to apply to a lot of music I heard at times. I'd say by now I've mostly changed my tune as I do find them largely an okay shortcut (on RateYourMusic or last.fm, for example) to get an idea of what a piece of music or an artist might be like. I still take them with a pinch of salt a bit though as there are many artists who do a variety of genres and/or are difficult to pinpoint. Also, there's probably quite a bit of labelling out there that's quite vague or even inaccurate. But overall, I'm fine with them now and use them more liberally.

Genre labels are awful there needs to be an accurate website that tells you the genre

I really like genre labels although often wikipedia doesn't give the right labels for songs.

I don't think too much about them because I often can't tell the difference beyond the general umbrella terms of pop, indie, dance, R&B, etc. Anything more specific than that isn't of interest to me at all I'll be honest - there's lots to analyse and enjoy about music but focusing on genre labels isn't one that bothers me, especially when there can be so little differentiating some of these descriptors.

They certainly have their place, if you go to a drum & bass night for example you know the sort of music you'll be getting. There are however genres that are meaningless of misused.

In the late 90s/early 00s I remember a lot of pop music being described as R&B to make it sound more credible but even actual R&B in the 90s was nothing like R&B in the 50s so it could be argued they shouldn't have the same genre label.

Then you had Britpop which was basically any British band with guitars. Musically Blur and Oasis sounded nothing like each other yet any American band who sounded like Blur or Oasis would be a different genre because they weren't British.

In dance music there are far too many genres, the number of different types of house music is ridiculous. The origin of the house genre was music played at the Warehouse Club in Chicago, similarly garage was music played at the Paradise Garage in New York so straight away a musics genre was dictated by whether it was made in Chicago or New York rather than what it sounded like. Make a similar sounding record in the UK in the late 80s and it's acid house. I recall a number of DJs being asked exactly what progressive house was and none of them could really answer.

On 29/08/2026 at 16:45, JosephStyles said:

I don't think too much about them because I often can't tell the difference beyond the general umbrella terms of pop, indie, dance, R&B, etc. Anything more specific than that isn't of interest to me at all I'll be honest - there's lots to analyse and enjoy about music but focusing on genre labels isn't one that bothers me, especially when there can be so little differentiating some of these descriptors.

Yeah, basically this. I listen to a wide range of music and I don't feel the need to assign specific genres to it all.