Hot Take: Do We Even Need Genres Anymore?
- LJ Portnoy
- Dec 21, 2025
- 6 min read
Article contributed by LJ Portnoy, Editor-in-Chief
The Old Borders Are Cracking
There was a time when genres held real power. They were the industry’s filing system, the listener’s compass, the cultural shorthand for who you were and what you stood for. If you said you were into rock, people made assumptions about your personality. If you said you loved pop, people assumed something entirely different. Genres carried weight, identity, and meaning.
They also created walls. They sorted people into tribes. They made entire groups refuse to listen to certain artists because the category label felt incompatible with their own sense of self. A genre was more than a sound. It was a label you either claimed or avoided.
But that world no longer matches how we create or listen to music. The borders that once defined the industry are dissolving. The categories that felt solid now feel slippery. The landscape is shifting faster than the genre list can keep up.
We are entering an era where genres are becoming less like fences and more like historical suggestions. Music today refuses to live quietly inside the boxes built decades ago. It is reshaping itself in every direction at once, blending, experimenting, colliding, and reimagining itself through the lens of a generation raised on unlimited access and emotional atmosphere.
The question now is simple.
Do we still need genres at all?
Here's our hot take.
Genres Were Created When the World Needed Order
In the early days of recorded music, genres were a necessity. They helped people understand what they were buying. They helped stores decide what to stock. They helped labels market their artists. They created a shared language for sound. Pop meant one cluster of qualities. Jazz meant another. Country belonged here. Rock belonged there. It was simple and efficient, the sonic equivalent of a map.
Genres helped artists define themselves as well. When you were trying to build a recognizable sound, choosing a genre was a form of artistic positioning. It offered a foundation to build upon. It gave listeners a sense of what to expect before they ever pressed play.
But as the landscape changed, the needs shifted. Genres started to feel less like tools and more like limitations. Fans grew more adventurous, and the internet made discovery easier. Cultures blended. Influences spread. The sonic palette exploded into thousands of colors rather than a few primary ones. The original purpose of genre became less relevant when listeners could explore an entire world of music with a single click.
Today, the world does not need clean categories. It needs language flexible enough to describe a universe of cross-pollinated sound.
What Genre Means in an Era of Creative Fluidity
Look at any major artist who defines this generation. Olivia Rodrigo can deliver pop-punk, grunge, and delicate piano confessionals in one project without anyone blinking. Doja Cat shapeshifts between rap, pop, alt, experimental, and whatever strange, fascinating territory she feels like exploring that week. Conan Gray glides between indie pop, synth pop, and soft rock. Dominic Fike bends acoustic storytelling into psychedelic pop and alternative rap.
Fans organize their libraries based on mood rather than genre. They build playlists like emotional diaries rather than taxonomies. Music discovery has become a form of personality expression. Spotify’s algorithm does not care if a song is labeled rock or electronic. It cares about the patterns in the sound and the emotional energy.
Genre, today, feels more like an outdated formality than a true descriptor.
People still use genre labels, but they rarely mean what they once did. Someone might say they love indie, but they likely mean a thousand micro-subcultures. Someone might say they love alternative, but the word barely captures the massive range of what alternative now includes.
The category is slipping. The identity is evolving.
The music is moving faster than the labels can follow.
Fans Care About Feelings Over Format
The average listener today cares about the emotional impact of a song far more than the category it belongs to. They care about the mood it evokes, the memories it unlocks, the feeling it creates in the body. If a song hits emotionally or sonically, fans do not stop to ask what box it belongs in. They simply add it to the playlist that matches the moment.
Listeners drift between emotional genres rather than sonic ones. They follow their own internal weather patterns. Cinematic alt-pop, atmospheric indie, ethereal vocals, glitchy electronic textures, soft acoustic ballads, angry pop anthems. The movement between styles is fluid and intuitive.
Genre used to signal belonging. Today, belonging comes from the feeling a song creates rather than the label attached to it. Fans find themselves in the emotional resonance of the music, not the marketing category.
Artists Outgrow Genres Faster Than Ever
Early in an artist’s career, genre can function as scaffolding. It gives new listeners something familiar to hold on to. But once an artist establishes a voice, genre becomes more of a restriction than a guide. Staying inside one lane for too long risks artistic stagnation. The audience begins to crave evolution. The artist begins to feel confined.
The artists who define this generation tend to push boundaries rather than protect them. They build collages rather than clear-cut styles. They blend influences with the freedom of creators raised in an environment where every sound is accessible.
Much of genre labeling now comes from marketing teams rather than the musicians themselves. The media still tries to classify artists through the lens of traditional categories. But the artists are moving faster. They are writing, experimenting, and genre-hopping in a way that refuses to fit the old mold.
The future of artistry lies in shapeshifting rather than categorizing.
Genre Collapse Is Both Liberating and Chaotic
Genre collapse frees artists to create with boundless curiosity. They can borrow textures from any tradition, blend styles without hesitation, and shape soundscapes that feel personal rather than procedural. They can build songs that feel like hybrid identities, layered and complex.
For listeners, the collapse creates a new kind of discovery. It becomes harder to find music based on category, but easier to find music based on emotional resonance. Exploration becomes an adventure rather than an assignment. The path becomes winding and unpredictable, but more exciting for it.
The melting pot effect does not homogenize music. It expands it. Anyone can create. Anyone can experiment. Anyone with taste, curiosity, and a laptop can shape something that feels exquisite.
The collapse of genre is not a loss. It is an expansion.
Streaming Accelerated the Shift
Streaming platforms have quietly replaced genre with data patterns. Playlists are sorted by mood and context rather than classification. Algorithms recommend songs by analyzing texture, tempo, structure, and listener behavior rather than the genre printed on the track. Discovery happens through curated emotional experiences rather than alphabetical organization.
Genre is no longer a guiding principle. It has become a background detail, something visible only when needed. In most daily listening, genre does not lead the experience at all. The invisible architecture of streaming has replaced it with something more fluid and more personal.
Sub-genres Are Becoming the New Cultural Centers
What used to be broad categories like pop or rock are now fracturing into hyper-specific microcommunities. Bedroom pop. Hyperpop. Alt-Z. Sad-girl indie. Soft grunge. Folktronica. Cinematic alt-pop. These small clusters hold more cultural meaning than the larger genres ever did.
Listeners build identities around these micro-scenes. Artists find communities based on shared aesthetics rather than broad umbrellas. The future is not one of genre collapse, but of genre multiplication in smaller, more expressive forms.
Hot Take: Do We Need Genres Anymore?
Not in the traditional sense. We need specificity, not generality. We need flexibility rather than restriction. We need creative language that breathes alongside the constant evolution of sound.
Listeners will continue to follow feelings more than categories. Artists will continue to create beyond the boundaries drawn decades ago. Music will continue to melt, blend, swirl, collide, and reassemble in ways that cannot possibly fit into the old folders.
Genres may linger as nostalgic references or marketing tools. But the heart of music is already moving beyond them.
The future belongs to cross-genres, sub-genres, micro-genres, and all the unnamed combinations of sound that artists have not invented yet. The future belongs to lush sonic experiments, mood-based listening, and the infinite palette of anything and everything happening all at once.
Genres are no longer the map. They are simply one page in the history of how we used to navigate music.
The new world is bigger. And honestly, it sounds incredible.
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