Lunar Boom Music Atlas
Music Genre Database
Explore the traditions behind the music. Choose a country, set an era, and discover genres shaped by place and time.
Country browsing is available from the selector while the interactive globe is unavailable.
Select a highlighted country
Genre results
Find a sound with a history.
Showing 12 of 531 genres
19972-Step
A late-1990s UK garage offshoot that traded four-on-the-floor certainty for a more elastic, skipping groove, 2-Step became one of the defining sounds of its scene.
19792-Tone
A concise, source-grounded description of 2-Tone as a British ska revival scene and genre, with documented Coventry origins and early representative recordings from The Specials and The Selecter.
19808bit – aka 8-bit, Bitpop, and Chiptune
8-bit music, also known as chiptune or bitpop, is characterized by its retro, electronic sound that mimics the audio from early video game consoles and computers. It often features simple, catchy melodies and is created using sound chips from vintage gaming hardware.
View guide1700A cappella
A cappella is one of those terms that sounds technical until you hear it: voices carrying the whole piece, with no instruments to lean on. Its roots are old and church-bound, but its modern life is broad, from Renaissance sacred music to polished pop and gospel vocal groups.
1984Acid Jazz
A London-born club genre that turned jazz-funk and soul grooves into something leaner, cooler, and made for the dance floor.
1897Acoustic Blues
A broad umbrella for unplugged blues traditions, acoustic blues links the oldest commercial blues sides to the field hollers, work songs, and rural guitar styles that shaped the genre’s early sound.
1990Adult Alternative
A radio-born umbrella term for polished, adult-facing alternative music, strongest in the 1990s and still useful as a listening shorthand.
1960Adult Contemporary
Adult Contemporary is a genre characterized by its smooth, melodic sound that often features soft rock, pop, and ballads. It is designed to appeal to mature audiences, typically incorporating polished production and themes of love and relationships.
View guide1977Adult-Oriented Rock
A concise, listener-friendly entry for a term that overlaps with both a radio format and a style label, with the ambiguity noted instead of flattened away.
African Blues
This entry treats African Blues as a broad, lightly standardized umbrella rather than a sharply bounded genre, and keeps the strongest documented anchors in Mali, Ali Farka Touré, and Tinariwen.
2007Afro Punk
Best treated as a cultural and scene-based label with punk at its core, not a tightly bounded genre definition.
1947Afro-Cuban Jazz
A New York-born meeting of Cuban rhythm and jazz language, Afro-Cuban jazz comes across as bold, layered, and built for motion. The documented record points to the 1940s, with Bauzá, Machito, Gillespie, and Pozo at the center of the story. (americanhistory.si.edu)
Browse the database