Era of origin
1960s music genres
Explore music genres with documented origins in the 1960s.
72 genre guides
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 guide1960American Trad Rock
A roots-heavy rock label with a clear editorial footprint at AllMusic, though it’s better understood as a style cluster than a rigid genre box.
1960Chicano music
This entry treats Chicano as a cultural music label rather than a single tightly bounded style. The strongest documented examples sit around Mexican American identity, East L.A. band sounds, and movement-era expression, but the category remains broad and somewhat fuzzy.
1960Christmas Rock
A seasonal offshoot where rock’s snap and volume meet Christmas songs, originals, and familiar holiday atmosphere. The strongest documented early examples come from 1960s U.S. pop-rock releases, especially The Beach Boys’ Christmas work.
1960Country Soul
A Southern crossover lane that turns country storytelling and soul phrasing into something bruised, tender, and unmistakably hybrid. Ray Charles is the key entry point, with later artists like Solomon Burke showing how durable the blend remained.
1960Drone
A concise genre entry that keeps drone grounded in documented roots: Indian sustained-tone practice, 1960s New York experimentalism, and later rock/ambient spillover.
1960Ethio-jazz
A concise, listener-facing update grounded in artist-page and album-page documentation, with the genre’s origin centered on Addis Ababa and Mulatu Astatke’s role kept explicit but not overclaimed.
1960Experimental Rock
A broad, flexible rock label for music that prizes risk, texture, and broken-open song form over polish and predictability.
1960Free Jazz
A concise, source-grounded overview centered on Ornette Coleman’s role in naming and defining the style, with John Coltrane included as a major related artist rather than a sole originator.
1960French Pop
A broad French-language pop umbrella rooted in the 1960s yé-yé era, with chanson at its heart and plenty of room for later stylistic drift.
1960Japanese rock
A roomy umbrella term for rock made in Japan, J-Rock stretches from the language-first breakthroughs of the early 1970s to the big, theatrical bands that carried it far beyond Japan. The label is broad, but that breadth is part of its appeal: it can hold tender melodicism, pop polish, and full-volume drama at once.
1960Latin Ballad
A romantic Spanish-language ballad tradition that matured across Latin America and Spain, balada romántica became one of the most commercially durable voices of Latin pop. Its most enduring recordings trade in restraint, velvet arrangements, and the dramatic clarity of a singer leaning hard into the feeling of the lyric.
1960Minimalism
A spare, patient, and deeply influential strand of 20th-century concert music, minimalism turns repetition into motion and small changes into drama. Its best-known works can feel almost architectural: simple materials, steadily re-lit from different angles.
1960Soul
A broad but well-documented Black American popular-music tradition that grew from R&B and gospel in the 1960s, with multiple regional and label-centered styles.
1960Southern Soul
A warm, groove-led Southern soul entry anchored in Memphis and Stax-era documentation, with example recordings chosen from official Spotify pages.
1960Straight-ahead jazz
A concise editorial update that treats straight-ahead jazz as a post-1960s critical label for acoustic, tradition-leaning jazz with older roots in swing, bebop, and hard bop.
1960Surf Pop
A sunny, harmony-led branch of early California surf music, surf pop leans more toward catchy vocal pop than raw instrumental surf rock.
1962Celtic
Celtic is less a single, tightly bounded sound than a family of related traditional musics, rooted in Irish and Scottish practice and carried into a wider international field through revival, recording, and crossover work.
1962Celtic Folk
A broad folk umbrella for traditional music from the Celtic world, with a sound that moves easily between plaintive songs and brisk dance tunes.
1962Halloween
A seasonal listening category built around novelty monster songs and horror soundtracks, with a strong American pop-culture core.
1964Anatolian Rock
A Turkish rock fusion rooted in the 1960s, Anatolian Rock still sounds vivid and handmade: folk melody against electric grit, with the bağlama often sitting right beside fuzz and feedback.
1964Blues Rock
A sturdy mid-1960s blues-and-rock hybrid with especially strong roots in British blues circles and electric blues crossover recordings.
1964British Invasion
A compact, historically grounded label for the 1960s British rock and pop wave that crossed into the U.S. and reshaped the sound of mainstream popular music.
1964Chamber Pop
A polished, orchestral-leaning pop tag with roots in older studio-pop traditions and a later indie revival. The term is useful, but its boundaries overlap heavily with baroque pop and orchestral pop.
1964Folk Rock
A concise, evidence-based portrait of folk rock as a 1960s crossover style that fused folk songwriting with rock’s amplification and momentum.
1964Funk
A rhythm-first American dance genre that emerged from soul and R&B, then spread outward into pop, hip-hop, and modern groove-based music.
1964Garage rock
A rough, fast-moving rock form from mid-1960s America, garage rock turns limited means into force: clipped chords, scraping guitars, and performances that feel one take away from falling apart. Its afterlife matters too, because later punk and revival scenes kept returning to that blunt, homemade electricity.
1964Hard Rock
A loud, riff-first branch of rock that hardened out of mid-1960s blues and psychedelia, then found its classic form in the 1970s through bands like Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, and AC/DC.
1964Middle of the Road
A historically radio-driven label for polished mainstream pop and easy listening, MOR is best understood as a broad adult-oriented zone rather than a strict genre boundary.
1964Orchestral Pop
A broad pop tag for records that trade in lush orchestration, dramatic lift, and polished melody. The label overlaps with baroque pop and chamber pop, so it works best as a listening guide rather than a strict taxonomy.
1964Post-Bop
A flexible modern-jazz label rooted in the mid-1960s: still connected to bop, but more adventurous in harmony, rhythm, and improvisation.
1964Psychedelic music
A broad 1960s rock umbrella built from studio experimentation, expanded song forms, and the countercultural imagination of the era. The label overlaps heavily with psychedelic rock and its offshoots, so the record stays intentionally general and evidence-led.
View guide1964Psychedelic Pop
A concise pop style that borrowed the shimmer, studio trickery, and strange glow of psychedelia without losing its melodic center.
1964Punk blues
A sparse, forceful hybrid that welded punk abrasion to blues phrasing and feeling, first crystallizing around The Gun Club and later widening in the early 1990s through Jon Spencer and peers.
1964Sunshine Pop
A bright, carefully arranged late-1960s pop style centered in California, where vocal blend and studio polish turn cheerfulness into something a little more shimmering and bittersweet.
View guide1964Vispop
A Scandinavian singer-songwriter tradition with Swedish roots, vispop sits between the old visa and a more polished pop sensibility.
1967Art Rock
A British-born, album-minded strain of rock that prizes scope, texture, and formal ambition over easy category lines.
1967Bubblegum Pop
A producer-led pop style built for instant hooks and bright, youthful energy, bubblegum pop peaked in the late 1960s and remains tied to a small cluster of canonical singles.
1967Cajun Fiddle Tunes
A historically grounded, fiddle-centered Cajun entry with a careful distinction between the older fiddle repertory and the broader Cajun music tradition that later foregrounded accordion.
1967Canadian Blues
A broad umbrella term for Canadian artists working in blues traditions, especially the scenes around Toronto and other urban club circuits. The label overlaps heavily with blues-rock and roots music, so it reads more like a national scene than a narrow style definition.
1967Chicha
A lively Peruvian urban genre with deep migrant roots, chicha blends Andean melody, cumbia pulse, and guitar-forward energy into a sound that feels festive, local, and restless all at once.
1967Christian Rock
A rock genre born in the Jesus Movement, Christian rock blends familiar guitars-and-drums energy with explicitly Christian lyrics. Its history runs from early pioneers like Larry Norman through bigger crossover acts such as Petra, Skillet, and Switchfoot.
1967Contemporary Christian music
A retrospective label for the early, foundational years of contemporary Christian music: faith-first songs, familiar pop structures, and a clear lineage back to the Jesus movement.
1967Cock rock
A critical label for swagger-heavy hard rock, cock rock sits at the intersection of sound, image, and performance politics. It is less a neat genre box than a way of describing how certain rock acts projected masculine power onstage and in the songs around them.
View guide1967Contemporary Christian Music
CCM is best understood as a broad modern Christian-pop category rather than a fixed sound. Its history runs from Jesus Movement beginnings into a sizable industry built around radio, retail, and worship culture, with crossover artists helping define its public face.
1967Contemporary Classical
A broad concert-music umbrella for living and recent composers, strongest when used for late-20th-century and current new-music practice. The category is wide enough to include minimalism, experimental writing, and orchestral or chamber works that still sound firmly of the present.
1967Contemporary Gospel
A modern gospel lane that kept the church at its center while opening the door to R&B polish, pop hooks, and broader crossover appeal.
1967Contemporary Singer/Songwriter
A modern continuation of the classic singer/songwriter idea, this tag sits where confessional writing meets cleaner pop craft. It is less a strict scene than a useful umbrella for artists who keep the song and the voice in the spotlight.
1967Country Pop
A mainstream-friendly country style shaped by Nashville polish and crossover ambition, with major visibility from the late 1960s onward.
1967Dansband
A Swedish dance-music tradition that grew into a named genre in the late 1960s and early 1970s, built for social dancing and sustained by long-running bands with strong ties to live venues and mainstream Nordic pop.
1967Dub
A Jamaican studio art that turned reggae mixes into spacious, bass-first soundscapes, dub grew from B-side versions into a lasting influence on electronic production.
1967European Free Jazz
A Europe-centered branch of free jazz that emerged in the 1960s, then moved toward its own vocabulary of collective improvisation, abrasive textures, and local avant-garde influence.
1967Exercise
A practical, playlist-first category built around movement, not a sharply bounded genre. Its roots sit in aerobics culture, and its modern life is mostly in streaming-era workout curation.
1967Jazz fusion
A jazz-rooted electric style that took shape around the turn of the 1970s, jazz fusion traded polished boundaries for long-form improvisation, amplified textures, and deep grooves.
1967Jazz Rock
A concise jazz-rock entry centered on the late-1960s fusion moment, with Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew as a key landmark and Chicago, Santana, and Blood, Sweat & Tears as documented examples of the style’s rock-side reach.
1967Jazz-Funk
A groove-first branch of electric jazz, jazz-funk sharpened in the early 1970s as improvisers folded funk and soul into the language of jazz. The result feels both muscular and agile: deep bass, clipped drums, and solos that move with the beat rather than against it.
1967Jazz Fusion
A concise, listener-friendly jazz-fusion entry grounded in official artist pages and canonical recordings.
1967Heavy metal
A broad rock umbrella that began with late-1960s heaviness and quickly spread into many subgenres, metal is less a single formula than a shared appetite for volume, weight, and dramatic force.
View guide1967Northern Soul
Northern Soul is less a neat genre than a nightlife obsession: a dancer’s culture built on rare, fast soul records and the thrill of discovery. Its story is inseparable from northern English clubs, record-hunting, and a canon of cherished American singles that found a second life on British dance floors.
1967Power Pop
A bright, compact rock-pop style that came into focus in the early 1970s and remained influential through punk, new wave, and indie rock.
1967Progressive Rock / Art Rock
A broad umbrella for late-1960s and 1970s rock that traded simplicity for scope, structure, and studio imagination. The label overlaps strongly with art rock, and the boundary between the two is intentionally fuzzy in the historical record.
View guide1967Progressive rock
A concise music-discovery label for the British-rooted rock form that pushed songs toward suites, concepts, and studio-scale ambition.
View guide1967Progressive Rock
A British-born rock style that pushed albums toward suites, concept pieces, and richer instrumentation, while keeping a strong pulse underneath the ambition.
1967Psychedelic Soul
A late-1960s soul strain that pushed warm vocal traditions into stranger, more experimental territory. Psychedelic soul kept the emotional core of soul intact, but wrapped it in fuzz, echo, and social turbulence.
1967Reggae
A Jamaican genre that emerged in the late 1960s, reggae slows the pulse without losing momentum, turning the groove into something spacious, patient, and socially charged. Its early history is tied to the shift from ska and rocksteady, with 'Do the Reggay' and Bob Marley & The Wailers standing as two of the clearest reference points.
1967Roots Rock
Roots rock sits close to rock’s foundation: songs with dust on the boots, blues in the fingers, and country or folk in the bloodstream. The genre name covers both the late-1960s move toward rougher, more traditional sounds and a later 1980s revival that pushed back against polished new-wave production.
1967Salsa
A broad, well-documented umbrella term for New York–centered Afro-Caribbean dance music that crystallized in the 1960s and 1970s.
1967Singer/Songwriter
A broad, durable label for artists who write and perform their own songs, usually with a close, personal point of view. The style is less about a fixed sound than about authorship, intimacy, and the feeling that the performer is speaking directly from lived experience.
1967Southern Rock
A rootsy rock style that grew out of the American South in the early 1970s, Southern rock paired blues-based guitar work with country phrasing, long jams, and a strong regional identity.
1967Truck-Driving Country
A roadside country subgenre built around the life, language, and loneliness of long-haul driving.
1967Turkish Pop
A mainstream Turkish pop entry that keeps the genre’s hybrid roots in view: Western pop forms, local melodic instincts, and a long line of star-making voices from Ajda Pekkan to Tarkan.
1968Baithak Gana
A well-documented Indo-Surinamese genre with clear Surinamese roots, strong ties to social and devotional performance, and a small but important recorded canon led by artists such as Ramdew Chaitoe and Dropati.