I'm fascinated by the proliferation of music genres over the past fifty
years. The branches of the music genre tree are now so fluffy, that
it's difficult to identify the full set of music genres.

A Google search on “music genres” returns a plethora of genre lists and
trees provided by search engines, music download sites and list freaks.
None of these lists appear to be quite the same and I haven't been able
to find a comprehensive list of current genres.

Despite this, genre lists and trees have become ubiquitious music discovery infrastructure. One of the nicest lists
I've found is on Wikipaedia. It has most of the top level and second
level genres as well as descriptions. Looking at this, I'm struck by
it's structural similarity to the Domain Name System, the tree upon
which the web is based.

An interesting aspect of this phenomena is that most, if not all of the
genres appear to have a sustainable number of producers and consumers.
There is probably a glut of performers in some genres. This is an
economy of niche markets of varying scale. An econometric analysis of
music dowloads sorted by genre would probably reveal  long tail
features.

Another matter of interest is the creation and use of genres by
artists. There have been impressive bubbles of genre origination, in
the 60s with Rock and all its sub genres, in the 80s with Punk, New
Wave and Electro-Pop and the most impressive, in the 90s with
Electronic and its spawn of sub genres. New genres have also arisen
more recenty such as Emo and Math Rock.

While many artists choose a genre and make it their own, some of the
most interesting recent music is difficult to categorise and may be a
new genre, non-generic, or meta-generic. Such artists may have
difficulty getting their music discovered by listeners and can languish
in the generic catch-all, Alternative. Others, such as Beck, have
achieved success with a post-modern approach that mixes and matches
genres. For some artists, genre manipulation has become a creative
element in composition and production. This is perhaps the most
significant recent development in music production.

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Posted in Economics by paul bambury No Comments Yet