The growing trend in music: Hybrid genres

Humans love to create order by putting things with commonalities into separate piles. This is the whole basis of music genres.

But then you hear a song, and you think, “Yeah, that’s kinda rock, but it’s also got elements of [genre 1], [genre 2], and [genre 3] in it. So what is it then? How do we categorize it?”

Welcome to the universe of hybrid genres, songs that are a stew of multiple sounds and influences that are at the same time familiar and different. And as music continues to separate, fragment, stratify, and mutate, hybrid genres are being created faster than ever. This is the natural order of things. And it’s increasing.

This means that traditional genres are losing their share of listeners. Chartmetric has a report which contains this chart that shows how listening to the top 10 traditional genres is declining compared to “other,” which is a soup of hybrid sounds.

This chart makes things even more clear.

Good thing? Bad thing? Neither?

As I said, this is the natural order of things. Thanks to the availability of hundreds of millions of songs on streaming services, people are being exposed to many different sounds. Creators then take all these sounds and smash them together to create new hybrids.

Like what? Phonk (an electronic/hip-hop combo built on the rap in Memphis from the 1990s) is very hot. Jerk (West Coast party hip-hop blended with certain modern types of NYC rap), pluggnb (minimalist beats mixed with smooth 90s R&B), and nu-gaze (traditional shoegaze blended with indie rock and electronica.)

The pace of hybrid genre creation is only going to increase. Might as well dive in.