I have been a musician since I was thirteen years old. I was a typical teenager growing up in central Canada, listening to the radio and buying my favourite LP’s.

Music Industry Changes

The music industry has gone through a handful of changes since I was a kid. I started listening to 45’s and LP’s. Then 8 track tapes were the in thing, and you could play then in your car. Then cassette tapes had a cycle. The CD’s became the music medium of choice. And now we have streaming music.

Music Influences

There are many bands and artists who’s music I listened to. I listened to radio music as I grew up, and as I drummed in bands, developed a liking for most all rhythmic music, especially Motown type music.

In the 1970’s, the genres were a handful – pop, country, soul, rock, hard rock, and maybe a few others.

Singer Songwriter ?

Now I am retired and write songs that I release each month. When I submit my songs to my music distributor, I have to check boxes describing my music, and that has always been difficult. They have quite a list of genres, and I have never felt that I was able to name my genre of music in which I write songs.

I am a singer-songwriter, but beyond that I feel a bit lost.

Spotify’s Playlists

If you use Spotify to play music these days, playlist are the new thing. A playlist is a collection of songs that can be done by anyone, who has a favourite list of songs they want to hear.

There are thousands of playlists to choose from. Some of the playlists become well known and played by thousands of Spotify customers.

Behind The Playlists

I was reading an article recently that cited some Spotify statistics, and they had a link to website titled –

https://everynoise.com/

I went there found a goldmine of information all about Spotify’s playlists. This list has over 6100 music categories or genres.

A number of the categories I would recognize and many I did not, in part because they are from other parts of the world, or have been recently created by younger artists and fans, who I am not familiar with.

Indie

A new word I had to learn was Indie. Indie stands for Independent artist, which most music artists are these days. It is made up of the thousands of recording artists like me, who do not have a recording contract.

An Impressive List

The list sorted by Popularity shows the top 10 genres as – pop, rap, rock, urbano latino, hip hop, trap latin, dance pop, reggaeton, modern rock, and latin pop.

What is Reggaeton music ? It is music that is a blend of reggae, dancehall, and latino music. It orginated in the 1990’s in Panama. I had to do a search on this one.

What is Urbano latino music ? Urbano latino music is an umbrella name for a handful of other latin genres being – reggaeton, dancehall, dembow, urban champeta, funk carioca and Latin hip hop.

In addition to getting a bit of an education looking up the definitions of these genres, I start to feel these genres are constantly evolving and changing, much like the rest of the world, but maybe at a faster pace.

Genre Songs

If you click on any genre, a list of the most popular songs will appear, and you can sample them.

Country Genres

There are even a handful of Canadian genres – Canadian Pop, Canadian Contemporary R&B, Canadian Country, Pop Quebecois. I have to admit that I am not familiar with any of the top artists in these categories.

Naturally there are other countries of the world that have their own country genres, which are part of the over 6000 genres that Spotify uses to categorize music.

A Bird’s Eye View

If you are looking for new music to listen to, check this website out –

https://everynoise.com/

This website gives a bird’s eye view of the music categories that are being used today, and it is a good place to start in helping me determine what my music genre is.