Era of origin
1970s music genres
Explore music genres with documented origins in the 1970s.
61 genre guides
1970Anime song
A music tag for songs made for anime openings, endings, inserts, and related releases, with roots in Japanese pop culture and a long runway into mainstream and streaming-era circulation.
1970Christian Pop
A pop-forward Christian music label most often used for polished, radio-friendly CCM with devotional lyrics.
1970Club / Club Dance
Club Dance music is characterized by its upbeat tempo, repetitive beats, and catchy melodies designed to energize and engage listeners on the dance floor. It often incorporates elements from various electronic music styles, including house, techno, and trance, and is typically played in nightclubs and dance venues.
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1970Crossover Jazz
A polished, commercial branch of jazz that became especially visible in the 1970s, crossover jazz often trades sharp edges for melody, groove, and a wider radio reach.
View guide1970Disco
A classic dance-floor genre born in U.S. club culture, disco fused funk, soul, and Latin grooves into a polished, propulsive sound that briefly dominated the pop mainstream.
1970Environmental
A softly defined but well-documented corner of ambient music, environmental leans toward natural sounds and designed atmosphere. The strongest historical anchors are early-1970s ambient/new age experimentation in the West and Japan’s later, explicitly named environmental-music scene.
1970Free Funk (Avant-Garde / Funk Jazz)
Free Funk is a genre that combines the improvisational and experimental elements of avant-garde jazz with the rhythmic and groove-based aspects of funk. It often features complex rhythms, unconventional structures, and a blend of acoustic and electric instruments, creating a sound that is both unpredictable and groove-oriented.
View guide1970Glam Rock
A British early-1970s rock style that pairs catchy, riff-forward songs with theatrical presentation and a deliberately glamorous edge. The best-documented core centers on T. Rex, David Bowie, and Roxy Music, with the scene’s influence stretching outward into punk and later hard-rock revivals.
1970Gulf and Western
A coastal-country shorthand anchored by Jimmy Buffett: part barroom storytelling, part sunset-at-the-marina sway, and never far from the Gulf or the beach.
1970Healing
A wellness-oriented New Age subgenre built around soft, soothing, and often nature-inflected sound, with its modern profile taking shape in the 1970s and 1980s.
1970Hi-NRG / Eurodance
Hi-NRG is a fast-paced genre of electronic dance music characterized by a high tempo, energetic beats, and catchy melodies. Eurodance combines elements of Hi-NRG, house, and techno, often featuring strong vocals and a prominent bassline.
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1970Hip-Hop
A Bronx-born culture turned global music language, hip-hop fused DJ craft, rhythmic speech, and neighborhood party energy into a form that could carry both celebration and critique.
1970Hip-Hop/Rap
A broad, mainstream umbrella for rap-centered music that began in the Bronx and quickly grew into a global culture. The earliest history is well documented, though the label covers a huge range of sounds and eras.
1970J-Punk
A broad umbrella tag for Japanese punk and punk-adjacent bands, useful for writing about the scene’s harder, poppier, and more garage-leaning branches without pretending they all sound the same.
1970Karaoke
Karaoke is a performance format built on communal singing, not a conventional genre. Its story begins in Japan with early coin-operated backing-track machines and grows into a worldwide social pastime.
1970Mbalax – Senegal
Mbalax is a vibrant and energetic genre that combines traditional Senegalese rhythms, particularly from the sabar drum, with elements of jazz, funk, Latin music, and other Western influences. It is characterized by its complex polyrhythms, fast-paced percussion, and often features call-and-response vocals.
View guide1970Meditation
A quiet, porous listening style that overlaps heavily with New Age and Ambient, meditation music is less a fixed canon than a way of shaping attention. Its documented modern history is strongest in 1970s relaxation/New Age recordings, especially the work of Steven Halpern and related artists.
1970Motown
A concise, reader-friendly Motown entry grounded in the label’s Detroit origins and its crossover soul-pop sound.
1970Nature
A broad New Age-adjacent tag for recordings that put birds, water, wind, and other natural sounds at the center, with Dan Gibson’s Solitudes standing as one of the clearest documented early references.
1970New Age
A broad, somewhat elastic genre that grew out of meditation-friendly and ambient-minded recording culture, New Age is best heard as a mood first and a category second. Its signature recordings favor atmosphere, gentle motion, and a polished sense of spaciousness.
1970New School Hip Hop
A contemporary catch-all label for modern, internet-era rap rather than a strictly defined historical subgenre.
1970Outlaw Country
A concise, evidence-based entry for the 1970s outlaw country movement, centered on its anti-Nashville stance, artist-driven control, and close ties to honky tonk, progressive country, and rough-edged storytelling.
1970Praise & Worship
Praise & Worship music is characterized by its uplifting and spiritual lyrics, often directed towards expressing devotion and reverence to God. It typically features contemporary musical styles, including pop, rock, and folk influences, and is designed to be sung by congregations during church services.
View guide1970Rap
A concise, evidence-based rap entry that keeps the focus on the Bronx origins, the DJ/MC foundation, and a couple of canonical early recordings.
1970Roots Reggae
A grounded, spiritually minded reggae style that emerged in Jamaica in the early 1970s and helped define the genre’s most socially conscious side.
1970Soca
A Carnival-born Trinidad and Tobago genre with deep calypso roots, soca grew from Lord Shorty’s early-1970s experiments into a wide modern Caribbean dance form.
1970Soft Rock
A radio-friendly branch of rock that softened the edges without losing the hook, soft rock grew out of early-1970s pop-rock and singer-songwriter culture and became a lasting FM staple.
1974Arena Rock
A polished, crowd-sized strain of hard rock that came into focus in the mid-1970s, arena rock is less about raw grit than about lift, sheen, and the instant communal charge of a giant chorus. Its center of gravity sits with bands that learned how to make FM-ready songs feel stadium-sized.
1974Art Punk
A compact, evidence-constrained update that treats art punk as a New York-rooted punk offshoot rather than a rigidly bounded genre.
1974Industrial
Industrial emerged from British experimental and punk-adjacent scenes, then spread into a wider network of noise, electronic, and rock hybrids. The early canon is well documented, though the label has always covered a messy, shifting set of sounds rather than one fixed formula.
1974Lovers Rock
A British-born reggae style with a soft-focus heart: lovers rock emerged in London’s Caribbean communities and made room for love songs that felt intimate, modern, and unmistakably local.
1974Punk
A concise, evidence-based punk entry centered on the mid-1970s New York and London scenes, with examples drawn from official artist pages and canonical recordings.
1976Relaxation
A gentle umbrella label for music made to calm the listener, strongest when treated as part of the new age and ambient-adjacent instrumental family rather than a fully separate genre.
1977Adult-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.
1977Britpunk
A useful blog-facing tag for early British punk, but not a tightly standardized historical genre name.
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.
1977Christian metal
A faith-forward branch of heavy metal that rose in the U.S. Christian rock scene and found one of its first breakout voices in Stryper.
1977Christmas: R&B
A seasonal R&B tag for holiday recordings that favor soulful vocals, gospel lift, and polished groove over novelty cheer.
1977Coldwave
A lean, icy corner of post-punk that found its clearest shape in France and Belgium, coldwave trades warmth for distance and lets atmosphere do the heavy lifting.
1977Contemporary Blues
A modern blues umbrella for records that keep the form’s emotional core but dress it in cleaner production and broader crossover color.
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.
1977Goth / Gothic Rock
Gothic Rock is characterized by its dark, mysterious, and often melancholic sound. It typically features deep, dramatic vocals, atmospheric guitar effects, and a strong emphasis on mood and emotion.
View guide1977Hair Metal
A glossy, hook-first strain of 1980s hard rock that blurred the line between heavy metal and pop, hair metal paired arena-sized choruses with MTV-ready glamour and then faded as grunge took over.
1977Hardcore punk
A concise, source-grounded profile of hardcore punk that keeps the early U.S. scene, the DIY ethos, and the first-wave bands in view.
1977Indie Pop
A melodic, intimate branch of independent pop that took shape in the UK indie scene and found one of its clearest early signposts in C86.
1977Industrial Rock
A noisy, machine-lit branch of rock that became widely recognizable through the late-1980s and 1990s work of Ministry and Nine Inch Nails. The genre’s strongest records balance grit and groove, letting the electronics grind against the guitars instead of merely backing them up.
1977J-Synth
A loose, reader-friendly tag for Japanese synth-led music, anchored most clearly in the legacy of Yellow Magic Orchestra and the broader techno-pop/synth-pop tradition that followed.
1977Kizomba
A warmly romantic Angolan genre whose modern identity sits between semba roots, diaspora circulation, and a close relationship with partner dance.
1977Modern Soul
A scene-born label with fuzzy borders, modern soul names the smoother, more contemporary side of UK soul collecting rather than a single locked-down style. The strongest documentation ties it to Northern soul culture, club play, and compilations of late-1970s to early-1980s dance-friendly soul.
1977New Acoustic
A loose but historically useful label for acoustic string music that opened bluegrass to jazz-like improvisation and wider harmonic color.
1977New Wave
A broad late-1970s-to-1980s pop-rock label that grew out of post-punk and became one of the era’s most durable crossover sounds.
1977Noise Rock (Japanoise)
A deliberately broad tag for Japanese noise and noise-rock activity, with Merzbow and Boredoms standing out as well-documented anchors. The term is useful for discovery, but the scene is wide enough that the boundaries stay fuzzy.
1977Old School Rap
A first-wave hip-hop tag for the records that turned Bronx block-party culture into a commercial form. The music still feels bright, loose, and social, even when the rhymes are simple by later standards.
1977Pagode
A samba-rooted Rio genre that grew from backyard gatherings into one of Brazil’s most recognizable popular styles. The most reliable accounts place its musical crystallization in the late 1970s and early 1980s, with Beth Carvalho helping carry it outward.
View guide1977Pop Punk
A glossy, hook-first branch of punk that found its modern shape in the 1990s, pop punk lives where speed meets sugar: sharp guitars, shout-along choruses, and songs that make small dramas feel enormous. Its history runs from earlier punk-pop crossovers into a definitive mainstream era led by bands like Green Day, Weezer, and blink-182.
1977post-punk
A concise, evidence-based post-punk entry centered on the genre’s UK origins, its move away from punk orthodoxy, and a few canonical reference points from Joy Division and peers.
1977Punk Jazz
A compact, evidence-based entry for a loosely documented label that grew out of New York’s no wave and downtown jazz worlds.
1977Smooth Jazz
A polished crossover jazz style that emerged from fusion and jazz-pop, smooth jazz found its broadest audience through radio-ready melodies, glossy production, and major crossover figures such as Grover Washington, Jr., George Benson, and Kenny G.
1977Synthpop
A concise, evidence-based synthpop entry anchored in early British electronic pop and the genre’s strongest documented lineage through Kraftwerk, The Human League, Depeche Mode, and Pet Shop Boys.
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.
1979New Romantic
A London-born style movement that fused post-punk ambition with synth-pop shine and an outsized sense of performance.