Genre is social rules, not just a sound palette
A music genre groups pieces that share a tradition or conventions—distinct from form or style, even when people blur the three. Franco Fabbri's 1982 definition, now treated as the standard one, frames genre as musical events whose course follows a set of socially accepted rules.
Genres can be sliced broadly, as popular against art or folk, or sacred against secular, or finely into subgenres like screamo, fusions like country pop and microgenres like mumble rap. Because music is an art, such labels are often subjective, contested and overlapping. Twentieth-century popular music alone has produced more than 1,200 definable subgenres, and fusion genres such as jazz fusion or country rock belong to two parents at once.
Douglass Green's 1965 book Form in Tonal Music drew the line between genre and form. The violin concertos of Beethoven and Mendelssohn share a genre but differ in form, he noted, while a Mozart piano rondo and an Agnus Dei from one of his Masses share a form yet belong to different genres. Style is murkier: Peter van der Merwe treats it as a synonym of genre, while Allan Moore keeps the two apart and lets subject matter separate genres too.
Philip Tagg proposed a triangle of folk, art and popular music, arguing that popular music stands apart through mass distribution and largely unwritten transmission. Vincenzo Caporaletti instead sorts music by its creative medium into written, oral and audiotactile branches, the last built around recording, as in jazz, rock and rap. Timothy Laurie notes that since the early 1980s genre has become a near-universal framework for studying music.
Machines sort music too. Data-mining tools classify tracks for digital distribution, and Glenn McDonald of The Echo Nest, owned by Spotify, mapped 5,315 genre distinctions in a scatter plot called Every Noise at Once. Another model rates songs on arousal, valence and depth, which helps explain why listeners enjoy similar tracks from supposedly separate genres.
Source: Music genre
