Music family
Electronic & Club Music Genres
Follow electronic music from studio experimentation to dance floors, covering club styles, synth-driven scenes, and evolving production cultures.
57 genre guides
1800March (music)
A brisk, public-facing band form with military roots, the march lives at the intersection of ceremony and spectacle. Its most enduring American voice is John Philip Sousa, whose marches turned parade-ground utility into concert repertoire.
1894Ragtime Blues
A cautious, historically grounded tag for music where ragtime syncopation and blues feeling meet. The term appears more useful as a descriptive overlap than as a formally established genre.
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.
1900Tex-Mex
A borderlands style with a deep dancehall history, Tex-Mex sits where Mexican regional traditions meet Texas country, polka, and the bright push of the accordion.
1917Klezmer
A living ceremonial tradition that traveled from Eastern Europe to the American recording studio, then returned as a revival music with new audiences and new energy.
1927Conjunto
A concise, borderland tradition note: classic conjunto is accordion-led dance music from the Texas-Mexico border, rooted in German and Czech influence and later carried into wider Tejano and Tex-Mex worlds.
1927South African music
This record should be treated as a broad umbrella entry rather than a single genre label. South African music spans many scenes and eras, so the safest approach is to describe the country’s musical ecosystem, then point readers toward representative artists and recordings.
1947Mambo
A Cuba-rooted dance genre that grew out of danzón, then burst into international popularity through Pérez Prado’s brassy, crowd-moving orchestral sound.
1950Dance
A useful umbrella tag, but not a tightly bounded genre. The strongest documented backbone is disco-era club music and its descendants, so the entry is best framed as a broad dance-music category rather than a single historical style.
1950Stand-up comedy
A live spoken-performance form that grew out of vaudeville and later found its modern shape in clubs, television, and landmark albums. The strongest documented examples lean on Richard Pryor and George Carlin, whose recorded sets helped define how direct and personal the form could be.
1950Zydeco
A dance-first Louisiana Creole music with accordion at its center, zydeco grew from local house-party traditions into a widely loved regional form. Clifton Chenier remains the key reference point, but the genre’s story is also carried by artists like Buckwheat Zydeco and Queen Ida.
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.
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.
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.
View guide1970Hi-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.
View guide1977Coldwave
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.
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.
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.
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.
1979New Romantic
A London-born style movement that fused post-punk ambition with synth-pop shine and an outsized sense of performance.
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.
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1980Dance-pop
A concise, reader-friendly snapshot of dance pop as glossy, hook-driven pop built for movement as much as melody.
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.
1980Jackin House
A compact, dancefloor-first strain of house rooted in Chicago’s post-disco lineage. The name is used a little loosely, but the music usually means gritty, swinging house built around funkier loops and a strong physical pulse.
1984Deep House
A foundational house subgenre with a distinctly nocturnal pulse, deep house pairs Chicago roots with soul, jazz, and funk inflections. The sound’s emotional center is as important as its beat: polished but intimate, danceable but reflective.
1984Electro-Industrial
A tough, metallic strain of industrial music that sharpened in the mid-1980s, especially around Canadian artists like Skinny Puppy and Front Line Assembly.
1990Dark Electro
A compact, club-ready strain of electro-industrial that darkens the machinery until it feels haunted.
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.
1990Intelligent dance music
A broad, slightly controversial tag for detailed electronic music that grew around Warp's early-1990s catalog and online discussion. The name is imperfect, but the music under it remains some of the most inventive headphone electronic music of its era.
1990Nu Jazz
A concise, evidence-based update that treats nu jazz as a broad, still-loose umbrella for jazz-electronic crossover scenes rather than a single tightly bounded school.
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.
1990Trip hop
A Bristol-born, press-labeled strain of downtempo music that turned hip-hop rhythm, dub weight, and soul fragments into something foggy, intimate, and unmistakably nocturnal.
1994Breakcore
A compact, high-intensity electronic style with roots in jungle and hardcore, breakcore lives on contrast: precision and chaos, humor and abrasion, dancefloor speed and collage-like experimentation.
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.
1997Aggrotech
Aggrotech is best understood as a harsh club-oriented branch of dark electro and electro-industrial, shaped by the late-1990s industrial scene and carried by acts like Hocico, Suicide Commando, and Combichrist. The term is real and useful, but it’s also a scene label with fuzzy borders rather than a tightly policed style.
1997Asian Underground
A British Asian electronic movement from the 1990s, Asian Underground fused South Asian musical elements with club-oriented electronic production and became a key site for diaspora identity in UK music culture.
1997Electro Swing
A danceable hybrid of old-school swing textures and modern electronic polish, electro swing grew from sample culture and club experimentation into a recognizable scene with a handful of major touchstones.
1997Electro swing
A compact, club-friendly offshoot of swing revival culture, electro swing sits between old records and new machines. The best-documented early names are Caravan Palace and Parov Stelar, both tied closely to the style’s rise in Europe.
1997Glitch Hop
A flexible, beat-driven electronic genre built from hip-hop rhythm and glitch-era sonic damage; the tag is real, but the borders are porous.
1997Hardstyle
A concise, evidence-constrained hardstyle entry centered on the Dutch-origin festival scene, with artist examples linked to official platform pages.
1997Hill Country Blues
A north Mississippi blues style built around repetition, groove, and a hard, hypnotic pull. The modern label is relatively recent, but the music’s local roots run deep in hill-country juke joints and community dance settings.
2000Bassline
A northern UK club style that grew from garage and speed garage, bassline remains most strongly associated with Sheffield’s Niche-era scene and later crossover records like T2’s "Heartbroken". The label has some fuzzy edges, but the core story is consistent across the strongest sources.
2000Dubstep
A South London bass music style that grew out of UK garage and pirate-radio culture, dubstep made space feel huge: the drums snap, the sub rattles, and the silence between hits matters as much as the hits themselves.
2000Electro house
A concise, evidence-bound portrait of electro house that keeps the genre’s club-rooted history intact while acknowledging its later EDM boom.
2000Liquid Dub
A flexible, lightly documented tag for dub-rooted electronic music with a smooth, liquid feel. Best treated as a browsing label that overlaps with liquid dubstep, dub techno, and mellow bass music rather than as a rigidly defined genre.
2004Electro swing
A concise, reader-friendly update grounded in artist bios and official pages; the genre’s early history is documented but not always cleanly labeled in one place.
2004Future Garage
A misty UK offshoot that turns garage’s springy swing into something more private and reflective. Future garage lives in the spaces between bass pressure and open air, with traces of club rhythm dissolved into atmosphere.
2007Brostep
A concise, evidence-based portrait of brostep as a late-2000s dubstep offshoot that sharpened the genre’s edges and found its biggest audience through UK pioneers and Skrillex-era mainstream exposure.
View guide2007Chillstep
Chillstep sits in the softer corner of dubstep, where the pressure drops away and the room opens up. Instead of pushing for impact, it leans into glowing synth pads, patient bass, and airy melodies that feel designed for late-night listening, study sessions, or a quiet headspace.
2007Durban Kwaito
A Durban-born kwaito offshoot with a club-first feel, Durban Kwaito sits between late-kwaito swagger and the harder, faster Durban dance sounds that followed. The documentation is uneven, but the genre’s center of gravity is clear enough to trace through Afrotainment, DJ Tira, and Big Nuz.
2007Reggaestep
A lightly documented fusion tag for reggae-meets-dubstep tracks, best treated as an online scene label rather than a settled genre family.
View guide2007Witch House
A late-2000s internet microgenre whose music and visuals arrived as a matched pair: murky beats, spectral vocals, and a scene built through blogs, labels, and a deliberately cryptic look.
2007Wonky Pop
A loose late-2000s UK pop label for clever, slightly off-center mainstream pop.
2009Chillwave
A blog-born microgenre with a short but visible peak, chillwave is best understood through its misty production, nostalgic mood, and the early recordings that helped name it. The term stuck even as many of the artists moved on, leaving a small but durable trail in indie-electronic history.
Kuduro
Kuduro is an Angolan dance-music current with a hard-edged pulse and a strong social memory. It began in Luanda, where street-level invention met electronic club sonics, and then traveled outward through artists and scenes that kept its energy tactile and communal.
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