Does it play on the oldies station? Then it’s an oldie.

Does it play on the rock station? Then it’s rock.

Does it play on the pop station, and sound like the most manufactured, fake, and passionless bullshit you ever heard? Then it is most definitely pop music.

I don’t think anyone understands ALL of them.

As you become familiar with a certain style, you notice differences between them. The deeper you dive and the more you listen to, the finer details you can recognize.

I could probably name at least 25 different genres of rock, and explain how they are different, but styles I’m not familiar with, I can usually only recognize the broadest category. Bluegrass all sounds like bluegrass to me, but an expert could identify 25 different subgenres of it.

This is what happens when you pay too much attention to any kind of taxonomy. Even scientific and rigorous taxonomy disintegrates into subjectivity when you look too close.

The idea of precisely labeling and categorizing things appears to be a human desire imposed upon an uncooperative universe.

The best way to learn this is by listening to music.

https://everynoise.com/

This is one of the cooler websites I’ve found over the years

It sounds like you want a clear set of rules as to what defines every possible genre of music, which does not and cannot exist.

Genres only exist for the purpose of subjective comparison. Anyone can create them by taking some elements common to several pieces of music and labelling that as a genre. There’s no master list or governing body that decides exactly what constitutes ‘art rock’. It just is.

Use them as labels if you find it useful to make a distinction that they allow for. If you don’t see the difference between death metal and heavy metal, great - you don’t need to.

It come down to this: what is the sound pallet and what is the beat pattern?

A jig is different from a reel or a waltz

Neuro Funk is different from trap house.

Some genres have more commonality than others. Blues songs often have a similar 12-bar structure, for instance. Not all Blues songs, of course, but there are some songs you can listen to and quickly identify it as Blues based on the structure. This structure exists to improvise on top of. Jazz has a lot of improvisation built into it too.

I also think genres in the past were based on which radio stations they were played on, back when radio was the main way to hear new music. “Pop” music simply meant “popular”, was meant to be more broadly acessible, and was played on Top 40 stations. Whatever counts as “pop” changes with the times. Now, while the distinctions still exist, I don’t think most young people get their music from the radio anymore, so the genres ar not to rigidly defined.

What I think it comes down to is that bands identify themselves based on whatever they listened to, and what influenced them. So the best way to know what genre a band plays is to ask them.

They tend to be distinct styles, similar to how bands within a genre can sound really different to each other. Now imagine that a couple of other bands says that one band’s style is the bee’s knees and start doing similar music.

It does get a bit too opaque and subtle at times, but I still think it’s usually helpful. e.g. “increasing level of angriness and decreasing level of clarity” is a big deal, many people don’t like listening to the extremely aggressive/unclear stuff and thus might say something like “I don’t like death metal, but power metal is great”. Even a Death Metal fan might think Grindcore is too much, etc.

And it’s pretty annoying when two things that should be different genres commonly get lumped together, like the early 2000s UK dubstep that was really bass-heavy, and Skrillex’ chaotic robot noises.

Some people really love labels and defining things clearly can be helpful in certain conversations. Personally I mainly listen to K-Pop which incorporates a bunch of genres and influences, so I think some genres are more like umbrella terms than anything.

https://musicmap.info/