It’s not very intuitive, for sure. It really is about if you were there at the time and probably place (up until, say, 2005) hearing XYZ song/style becoming popular on the radio and mass media. Only then do you pick up the lingo and see how other people referred to it.

Plus, go browse the racks at a music store in another country (preferably where the main language is different from your own). I remember seeing a Tower Records in a major Japanese city have a whole area designated as “Black Music” (not like a seasonal feature/display, but a section/‘genre’) and being baffled, like all soul blues funk R&B early rap gangsta rap and dance pop was all one section (filtered only by skin color)? But then again, is all J-pop or K-pop always the same style, or do English-language listeners lump a lot of things together by overarching basic criteria? (Like just shuffling music off based on country/language of origin etc)

Alternative rock was different to the popular rock from on mainstream stations in the 70s/80s and early 90s. See also “college rock.” But then alternative rock becomes mainstream and fractures into subgenres (for example, compare Limp Bizmit once called “nü rock” and White Stripes “garage rock” — fairly different styles), less mainstream artists continue plugging away in their various “indie” lanes, plus what does “college rock” (like REM of the 80s) mean in the 2010s/2020s anyway? Short answer: big fat nothing; long answer is, first you start doing deep dives in music journalism of yore, browsing the categories/sections at record stores, talk to old music heads and hear their opinions (mostly opinions, right, less ‘facts’), and then you have a better lay of the many various musical landscapes and keep exploring.

It’s a language so that people can discuss varying levels of nuance with each other. You probably don’t care about the difference between industrial metal and folk metal, but metalheads certainly do. And even that’s a pretty top level example.

Same goes for every other genre/subgenre. Indie pop and bubble pop can be very different, and just because someone likes one doesn’t mean they’ll like the other.

There is also a historic factor in all this because genres are always influenced, derived from, or mixed with other genres. Triphop was born this way, as a mix of hiphop, jazz, dub, electronica, and many others

Tldr: Think of it as painters describing colors

I’ve actually been looking into how music genres/subgenres are defined for the past few months due to the fact that my favorite genre “doesn’t exist” (I’m not joking someone wrote a research paper on this)

I think there are research articles on this if one wants to go into details… Like how certain genres separate. Sometimes there are strict definitions (most techno I think are quite well-defined). But practically I think most ppl tend to enjoy ranges of genres that are close to each other… There are also plenty of genre-blend songs too so there’s that

Also I second for Every Noise At Once, they have some really obscure genres too for detailed comparisons

The labels and categorisation of everything can get tiring, and be utterly useless or confusing for anyone unfamiliar with a particular genre (it all sounds the same!), however these can still be handy when you find a particular sound you like, you can use that to discover other bands with similar sounds or style.

As bands in that genre experiment and evolve their sound, they may cross, mix it create all new genres that can lead you down a new list of bands to explore - or perhaps it’s not your flavour so you stick with what you like.

Most hobbies have depth to them like this, I guess music is so variable that we need a thousand ways to describe all the various possibilities.

I don’t think anyone understands ALL of them.

As you become familiar with a certain style, you notice differences between them. The deeper you dive and the more you listen to, the finer details you can recognize.

I could probably name at least 25 different genres of rock, and explain how they are different, but styles I’m not familiar with, I can usually only recognize the broadest category. Bluegrass all sounds like bluegrass to me, but an expert could identify 25 different subgenres of it.

https://everynoise.com/

This is one of the cooler websites I’ve found over the years

I’m an avid music listener and don’t really get it either. The main thing is that I don’t view genres as rigid categories, rather as general descriptions of how music sounds. Bands can have albums or even individual songs that don’t fit the genre of their other albums/songs.

With metal and all of its sub-genres in particular, sometimes it feels like splitting hairs.

The best way to learn this is by listening to music.

Think of them not as means of differentiating musical style for you, but as historical ways of explaining how a band or musical movement differed from the norm.

Take a band like The Beach Boys. In the 70s, what they were doing was alternative rock — that is, they took the dance/music genre of classic rock and roll, and re-imagined how it would sound on a sandy beach at a surf party instead of in a dance hall.

Enter the 80s, and their music became part of the cultural norm, so they were popular/“pop” music.

And yet, as a band, they kept adding new techniques and writing new music right into the 2000s, often drifting back out of popular culture while doing so.

The point of this is, see what the subgenre tells you about the musicians; it isn’t really a useful way to clearly divide musical works themselves into subcategories.

It sounds like you want a clear set of rules as to what defines every possible genre of music, which does not and cannot exist.

Genres only exist for the purpose of subjective comparison. Anyone can create them by taking some elements common to several pieces of music and labelling that as a genre. There’s no master list or governing body that decides exactly what constitutes ‘art rock’. It just is.

Use them as labels if you find it useful to make a distinction that they allow for. If you don’t see the difference between death metal and heavy metal, great - you don’t need to.

This is what happens when you pay too much attention to any kind of taxonomy. Even scientific and rigorous taxonomy disintegrates into subjectivity when you look too close.

The idea of precisely labeling and categorizing things appears to be a human desire imposed upon an uncooperative universe.

Some genres have more commonality than others. Blues songs often have a similar 12-bar structure, for instance. Not all Blues songs, of course, but there are some songs you can listen to and quickly identify it as Blues based on the structure. This structure exists to improvise on top of. Jazz has a lot of improvisation built into it too.

I also think genres in the past were based on which radio stations they were played on, back when radio was the main way to hear new music. “Pop” music simply meant “popular”, was meant to be more broadly acessible, and was played on Top 40 stations. Whatever counts as “pop” changes with the times. Now, while the distinctions still exist, I don’t think most young people get their music from the radio anymore, so the genres ar not to rigidly defined.

What I think it comes down to is that bands identify themselves based on whatever they listened to, and what influenced them. So the best way to know what genre a band plays is to ask them.

They tend to be distinct styles, similar to how bands within a genre can sound really different to each other. Now imagine that a couple of other bands says that one band’s style is the bee’s knees and start doing similar music.

It does get a bit too opaque and subtle at times, but I still think it’s usually helpful. e.g. “increasing level of angriness and decreasing level of clarity” is a big deal, many people don’t like listening to the extremely aggressive/unclear stuff and thus might say something like “I don’t like death metal, but power metal is great”. Even a Death Metal fan might think Grindcore is too much, etc.

And it’s pretty annoying when two things that should be different genres commonly get lumped together, like the early 2000s UK dubstep that was really bass-heavy, and Skrillex’ chaotic robot noises.

It come down to this: what is the sound pallet and what is the beat pattern?

A jig is different from a reel or a waltz

Neuro Funk is different from trap house.

Some people really love labels and defining things clearly can be helpful in certain conversations. Personally I mainly listen to K-Pop which incorporates a bunch of genres and influences, so I think some genres are more like umbrella terms than anything.