Edit: Totally redone since people seem to think I’m completely stupid or something.
How do you tell the difference between closely related genres? For example, I saw an artist listed as “pop, bubblegum pop, indie pop, pop punk, electropop” and I don’t understand how those are all different genres. Or you have rock, punk rock, grunge rock, and alternative rock. Like what themes or instruments or whatever defines these genres and makes them not the same as all the others?
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At a very high level, the larger genres (classical, rock, jazz, rap, etc) are all pretty easy to tell apart based on the traits they have – the instruments used, the rhythms, vocal styles and so on.
When you start subdividing the genres, you are just being more specific about how you classify them, and are typically referencing elements of the music that are perhaps less obvious to casual listeners but clearer to devoted fans. So a metalhead will quite quickly be able to listen to a band and tell you whether they are thrash metal or black metal based on the differences in things like the guitar playing or vocal styles, while to an outsider they basically sound the same as they are not so attuned to the general style or differences between them.
The trick is in realising that ultimately there are no rules or guidelines to genre classification, other than what is haphazardly mutually agreed by the masses. The band you may consider as garage rock, someone else may classify slightly differently based on their own ideals of what each genre should sound like. So while the bigger overarching genres are pretty set through common consensus over the years, the deeper you go into subgenres the more disagreement you will find.
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