Genres started as labels on a shop shelf
In the 1920s, American record companies sorted records by who they expected to buy them, not by how they sounded. Music by Black performers — BLUES, JAZZ and GOSPEL alike — was sold as 'race records', and music by white musicians from the countryside as 'hillbilly' records. In 1949 the music magazine Billboard renamed its charts: race records became rhythm and blues, and hillbilly music was listed as country and western. The new names described the music; the old ones had described the listeners.
Plenty of labels still work that way. LATIN covers Cuban salsa, Brazilian bossa nova, Puerto Rican reggaeton and Mexican mariachi — styles as different from each other as ROCK is from OPERA — grouped by language rather than sound. INDIE is short for independent: when Britain's indie chart began in 1980, it listed records put out by small labels outside the big companies, whatever they happened to sound like.
Crossing the line starts arguments
In 1965 Bob Dylan, the biggest name in FOLK, walked on stage at the Newport Folk Festival with an electric guitar and a loud band behind him, and parts of the crowd booed. To some fans, plugging in meant leaving folk for ROCK, and that felt like a betrayal.
Sixty years on, the arguments haven't stopped. In 2019 Billboard took Lil Nas X's 'Old Town Road' off its COUNTRY chart, saying it was not country enough. The song then spent a record nineteen weeks at number one on the main chart, helped by a remix with a country star.
Church music had its own row. Thomas A. Dorsey played blues piano in clubs as Georgia Tom before turning to hymns such as 'Take My Hand, Precious Lord', one of the best-known GOSPEL songs ever written. He brought BLUES rhythms into church, and at first not every congregation approved.
One city's sound, and songs with no author
Some genres have a birthplace. GRUNGE came out of Seattle in the late 1980s, where bands in flannel shirts played heavy, fuzzy ROCK with PUNK's rough edges. In January 1992 Nirvana's album Nevermind knocked Michael Jackson off the top of the American album chart, and suddenly the whole world was listening to one rainy city.
FOLK is the opposite: traditional songs with no known author, passed on by ear and changed a little by every singer. In the 1800s the scholar Francis James Child collected 305 old English and Scottish ballads, and some of them are still being sung and recorded today.
Six thousand genres and counting
Streaming has sliced music far more finely than any record shop could. One project that mapped the genre names Spotify uses, called Every Noise at Once, counted more than six thousand. Most listeners don't stick to one anyway: the same playlist can hold FOLK, FUNK and SWING, and plenty of artists change style between songs on a single album. Many of the genres in this grid have their own puzzle, from rock and roll and hip-hop to disco and reggae.