Country of origin
Germany music genres
Explore music genre guides with documented origins in Germany.
10 genre guides
1750Volksmusik
A warm, practical overview of German folk music as a living traditional practice rather than a single fixed sound, with a note that the commercial volkstümliche side sits nearby but is not identical.
1900Electronic music
A broad, studio-born genre with deep roots in early electronic instruments and a major public breakthrough through European pioneers in the 1970s.
1900Expressionist music
A historically grounded early-modernist tag, best used for Schoenberg-centered works that push emotional extremity through dissonance, fragmentation, and speech-like vocal writing.
1900Schlager
A warm, mainstream German-language pop tradition with deep roots in operetta and postwar hit culture, schlager remains a durable home for big hooks, plainspoken emotion, and a polished, communal feel.
1977Chamber Jazz
A flexible jazz tag for intimate, composition-minded playing rather than a single rigid scene. The strongest documented history ties it to mid-century third stream ideas, Jimmy Giuffre’s small-group experiments, and later ECM-era European recordings.
1977Electropop
A pop-first electronic style that took shape around late-1970s and early-1980s synth experimentation, with especially strong roots in the UK and clear influence from Kraftwerk.
1980German Pop
A broad umbrella term for German-made pop, with its clearest historical lift coming from the early-1980s Neue Deutsche Welle wave and the long afterlife of German-language chart pop.
1987Technical Death Metal
A concise, evidence-based entry for a genre that grew out of death metal’s early appetite for complexity. The scene’s history is less about a single birthplace than a cluster of landmark bands and recordings that made technical precision feel central rather than ornamental.
1990Hard Dance
A broad, scene-based label for the harder edge of EDM, with its strongest documented roots in European rave culture and its clearest modern use as an umbrella over hardstyle, hard trance, hard house, and hardcore.
1990Speedcore
A fast, abrasive corner of hardcore techno that crystallized in the 1990s and still lives mostly through underground labels, artist pages, and scene-specific releases.