Music family
Cinematic & Soundtrack Music Genres
Discover music shaped for screen, narrative, atmosphere, and dramatic impact, from score traditions to modern soundtrack styles.
8 genre guides
1892Soundtrack
A broad screen-music umbrella: part score, part song album, and always tied to a story on screen.
1920Original Score
A practical, industry-facing label for music written to fit a specific screen story. The phrase sits closest to film scoring, but it also travels across television and games, where the same basic job applies: support the image, steer the feeling, and leave enough room for the scene to breathe.
1927Movie Soundtrack
A broad, film-centered category that stretches from silent-era accompaniment to modern soundtrack albums, with a history rooted in live performance and later standardized by synchronized sound.
1950TV Soundtracks
A broad television-music tag covering themes, score, library cues, and licensed songs. The category is real and useful for discovery, but it spans several practices rather than one tightly bounded genre.
1962Halloween
A seasonal listening category built around novelty monster songs and horror soundtracks, with a strong American pop-culture core.
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.
1980Urban Cowboy
A soundtrack-driven country crossover moment that helped define the early-1980s mainstream turn in country music.
Disney music
A broad umbrella for Disney-associated songs and scores: less a single genre than a branded musical world built around melody, character, and narrative payoff.