Staff Writer- Will Tran

In the modern world of music—where a new subgenre seems to appear every week, and Spotify invents a few more playlist names every month that sound more like food descriptions (“Creamy Pop,” “Chill Vibes,” “Deep Focus”)—genre labels that once felt familiar are slowly turning into a joke. They were created to help us understand music, yet sometimes they are the very thing that makes music… harder to understand. More than once, I’ve felt like I was reading an IKEA assembly manual with missing pages: the sound flowing into my ears bears no resemblance to the label printed on it.

This becomes clearest when we look at the contrast in how genres are classified. Some genres are divided with extraordinary precision—pop splinters into hyperpop, bedroom pop, and sad pop, while EDM branches into deep house, tech house, and future bass. Here, classification follows acoustics, and it is so exact that new listeners might feel like they’ve stepped into a sonic laboratory. Just a few misplaced kick patterns or a slightly different shade of synth is enough to move you into an entirely different genre.

On the opposite side, we find giant boxes that contain everything—sometimes to the point of confusion. Take “classical,” for instance. A single word is asked to carry six centuries of music, grouping Bach, Mozart, Debussy, and Stravinsky as if the only thing separating them were… age. Placing Baroque, Romantic, and Modernism under the same label leaves many newcomers to classical music feeling lost, often leading them to conclude that classical music is “hard to listen to,” when the real problem lies in a label far too broad to reflect the richness within.

“World music” goes even further. It’s practically a multipurpose suitcase into which anything non-Western is packed for convenience. Vietnamese folk music, Indonesian gamelan, Pakistani qawwali, Nigerian Afrobeat, Celtic folk, Japanese shamisen ensembles—everything ends up under the same label. Musical scales, performance techniques, and philosophies that have nothing in common are treated as if they were part of one monolithic genre. If people didn’t know this was a music classification, they might assume it was the work of someone… slightly too busy. Grouping vast musical traditions under one vague title is not only inaccurate—it dilutes the cultural identities behind them.

On the other side of the spectrum, we also have labels treated as genres even though they have nothing to do with musical structure. Lo-fi is the clearest example. It is fundamentally an aesthetic—a style of sound processing with noise, warm textures, and a hint of “vintage.” But thanks to the popularity of study playlists, lo-fi is now misunderstood as a standalone genre. Many young artists believe lo-fi must be minimalistic or built on two repeating chords. An aesthetic suddenly becomes a requirement, confining music under expectations unrelated to its true nature.

Indie faces a similar problem. Indie literally means “independent”—a production model—but gradually it has been equated with a particular sonic color: gentle, somewhat melancholic, sometimes… carefully non-mainstream. Ironically, many true indie artists sound nothing like that definition, while artists who do embody the “indie sound” might not be independent at all.

And then there’s “alternative”—originally just an attitude opposed to the mainstream—now treated as a specific genre. Alternative rock, alternative pop, alternative R&B all sound reasonable until you notice they share no common musical structure. The only thread connecting them is ambiguity. And when “alternative” becomes an actual genre, any artist who doesn’t fit into a standard box gets pushed into it—as though it were a temporary waiting room for everything that defies classification.

These distortions do more than confuse. They have real consequences.

For listeners, overly broad labels or misapplied tags cause them to lose access to music’s true diversity. Someone trying to explore classical music may think Bach and Rachmaninoff “sound similar,” then assume classical music is “difficult,” simply because they weren’t shown the right doorway. A world music listener might believe all Asian or African music shares the same “vibe,” even though Pakistani qawwali and Vietnamese đàn tranh share no similarity beyond not being European.

For artists, incorrect labels create incorrect molds. A lo-fi producer may feel pressured to simplify their work to satisfy playlist algorithms. An indie artist may feel discouraged from experimenting with orchestral arrangements or complex structures out of fear of losing their “indie identity.” An alternative artist might find themselves trapped in a land with no clear identity, where everything is allowed but nothing is understood properly.

For culture, using overly broad labels unintentionally flattens identity. When a vast musical tradition is placed under a vague category, what fades is not just the sound—it is the story behind it, the layers of history, context, and community embedded within.

We don’t need to abolish genre systems entirely—they remain useful starting points for listeners. But perhaps it’s time to acknowledge that music has grown far beyond these boxes. Instead of forcing everything into outdated labels, we can accept that a single piece might carry multiple layers: pop in structure, lo-fi in aesthetic, indie in production model, alternative in attitude. Instead of treating world music as a genre, we can call things by their names: Vietnamese folk, Pakistani qawwali, Nigerian Afrobeat, Indonesian gamelan. Instead of treating classical as a monolith, we can name its eras and schools accurately.

Genres were never meant to be barriers—they were meant to be guides. And when music spills out of the boxes we built for it, the problem isn’t with the music. It may simply be time for labels that fit a little better.