Tracking genre diversity and fluidity in the Billboard charts

Here’s a thought experiment: Try describing “Un Día” — a song released in July 2020 by J Balvin featuring Dua Lipa, Bad Bunny and Tainy — with just one genre.

J Balvin is known as a reggaeton artist, but “Un Día” sounds like much more than “just” reggaeton. The song has been nominated for Best Pop Duo/Group Performance at the 2021 Grammys, but just “pop” isn’t enough to evoke the song’s myriad influences, spanning from reggaeton to house and dancehall.

This task feels nearly impossible, and reminiscent of a conundrum that’s all too common in the mainstream recorded-music industry today. It’s the same conundrum that excluded Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” from the Billboard country charts, or that saw Billie Eilish’s “bad guy” categorized as a pop record at the Grammys but as an alternative rock record at the iHeartRadio Music Awards.

Now more than ever, artists both emerging and mainstream are blending multiple sounds and influences into their work, in a way that cannot be boxed into a single, traditional genre category. Of course, this “trend” has been in the making for decades; celebrities like David Bowie, Prince, Michael Jackson and Beyonce have withstood the test of time and grown into iconic brands in their own right because of their impeccable genre-bending capabilities.

The genre fluidity of more recent years is partially the result of easier access to music thanks to technology, and partially a reflection of evolving social and consumer behavior. A 2018 study from McKinsey & Company found that Gen Zers are more interested in shying away from rigid societal norms and experimenting with different aspects of their identity, especially with regards to sexuality and gender. That same year, the Gen Z-focused digital media company Sweety High found that 97% of female Gen Zers aged 13 to 22 listen to at least five music genres on a regular basis.

Yet from charts to awards shows and label departments, incumbent music-industry gatekeepers continue to uphold traditional genre categories. This arguably does not reflect artists’ creative output, nor the evolving ways in which fans consume new music today. In fact, if you really look at the data, genre fluidity is not just a fringe characteristic of a few artists or listeners — it’s the defining sound of today’s generation.

Quantifying genre diversity and fluidity

To quantify the state of genre diversity and fluidity in popular music today, we tracked how music fans and aficionados categorized the genres of the Top 10 tracks of Billboard’s Year End Charts from 1950 to 2019, drawing from publicly available data sources such as MusicBrainz, AllMusic, Hit Songs Deconstructed and Wikipedia. We found that some songs had as many as seven different subgenre tags in our analysis.

We also make a distinction between chart-level genre diversity, i.e. how many genres and subgenres in total are represented among the top 10 songs for a given year, and song-level genre fluidity, i.e. how many different subgenres are associated with a given top-10 song over time. This distinction is important because a top-10 chart can be genre-diverse without being genre-fluid (i.e. if each individual song on the chart only consists of one kind of sound).

A. Genre diversity

Starting with the bird’s-eye view of all 69 years (1950–2019, pictured above) gives us a few valuable insights on how genre has evolved in popular music over time. For instance, vocal music (e.g. Patti Page’s “Tennessee Waltz”) clearly ruled the charts from 1950 to 1956; electronic sounds then permeated the music industry with the introduction of synthesizers in the late ‘70s, followed by the persistent rise of hip-hop and rap in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s.

In the second half of the 20th century, the Billboard Top 10 stayed pretty consistent in terms of the number of subgenres represented, hovering at around 14 to 20 subgenres on average. The first significant, sustained increase in genre diversity was in the late 2000s, when the Billboard Top 10 had an average of 25 subgenres. Some of the songs that got into the Top 10 at the time included Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face,” which had four different sounds (Pop, Rock, R&B and Electronic), and the Black Eyed Peas’ “Boom Boom Pow” and “I Gotta Feeling,” which dipped into electronic, rap, dance, rock and R&B sounds.

The second big influx of Top-10 genre diversity happened from 2013 to 2016, largely because the songs themselves became much more genre-fluid. The average number of subgenres per song in this period was more than four — even higher than today. Examples from this period include “Don’t Let Me Down” by The Chainsmokers ft. Daya, which was tagged with six different sounds including Dance/Club, Electropop/Synthpop, Hip-Hop, Alternative/Indie, World Music and Pop, and “Work” by Rihanna ft. Drake, which tapped into seven different sounds including Electropop/Synthpop, Hip Hop, Soul, World Tropical Dancehall, House Music and Dance/Club.

B. Genre fluidity

2019 continues this trend as one of the most genre-diverse and genre-fluid years on record for popular music. According to our analysis, the year boasted a total of 38 sub-genre tags among the top 10 songs, with some songs having as many as five tags each (e.g. “Talk” by Khalid had sounds of Pop, Electro Pop, Soul, Funk and Hip-Hop). The average number of subgenre tags per Top-10 song in 2019 was 3.8 — more than 93% of the other years we analyzed. All in all, both chart-level genre diversity and song-level genre fluidity have more than doubled since 1950.

Moreover, while Rap and Pop were unsurprisingly the most popular genre categories in 2019, their dominance alone doesn’t tell the whole story. 56% of the Pop songs we analyzed between 1955 (when Pop first appeared as a genre category in our dataset) and 2019 were labeled with Pop and another subgenre; only 9% of these songs were labeled only as Pop. This suggests that the word “pop” has evolved into more of a commercial stamp of popularity than a defining sound per se, especially as more genre-fluid artists like Billie Eilish, Jacob Collier and The Weeknd pave their own paths to mainstream success.

Do traditional genre categories still play a role?

We now have concrete proof that genre fluidity is now commonplace in the most commercially popular music of our time. So what are music companies that rely on traditional genre categories doing about it?

To find out, we took our results to a handful of multiple music-industry stakeholders, and asked for their perspective on what this increasing genre diversity and fluidity meant for the future of their jobs and the industry at large.

One interesting pattern we found was that the enforcement of traditional genre categories tends not to happen at the A&R stage, when labels are first scouting emerging acts to sign to their rosters. Most of the A&R reps we spoke to claimed that they aren’t always focused on genres; rather, they focus on finding artists making great music who would be a good fit for the given label, and take care of categorization matters later. As Ryan Murphy, A&R at 12Tone Music Group (88rising, Anderson .Paak, Lauren Daigle), tells us: “It always starts with [artists] just making the music, and once you hear it and evaluate it, you kind of start thinking, where does it live?”

Instead, genre categorization becomes a more important tool at the later stages of music marketing and promotion. Labels are essentially forced to push the artists on their rosters into traditional genre categories for the sake of optimizing for chart placement and awards season, whether or not it really makes sense for a given artist’s creative output. A common argument in support of traditional genre categorization is that it helps segment and market music in a way that is more digestible to the average consumer. Observing traditional genre boundaries might also allow more diehard music fans to identify benchmarks for tracking creative evolution and innovation from their favorite artists, producers and composers.

With that said, in the wake of more genre-fluid creativity, artists can actually use traditional genre taxonomies to their advantage, in two seemingly opposite but complementary ways. Namely, as an artist, you can keep “grinding in your lane and establishing [yourself as the top artist] in one genre,” in the words of Chris Lopez, Label Head at Tarsier Records. Lopez cites his experience with emerging R&B singer-songwriter Kiana V as an example; early on, it’s about cultivating the artist’s voice and creating a core fanbase around a specific sound.

But once you nurture that fanbase and plant your flag in a given genre, you can then “tear the walls down and show people that they don’t know what they want until you show them,” in the words of Nicole Otero, a former press assistant at Decca Records who now works as a marketing assistant at Secretly Group.

Otero cites Decca artist Jacob Collier as a prime example; the multifaceted artist is consistently categorized as “jazz,” in part given his early affiliation with Quincy Jones, but continues to break new creative ground in a way that cannot be pinned down to just jazz alone. Collier’s latest album, Djesse Vol. 3, is a genre-bending melting pot, featuring appearances from the likes of Rapsody (hip-hop/rap), Mahalia (R&B/neo-soul) and Kimbra (pop, R&B and rock). Post Malone took a similar trajectory of staying in a particular musical lane until he got more mainstream recognition. He first established himself as a hip-hop and rap artist, but has since expanded into more pop- and rock-oriented sounds, even recently performing a Nirvana tribute set.

This artist-centric trend, plus evolving consumer behavior discussed at the outset of this article, suggests that the argument that traditional genre categories are important for consumer “digestibility” is less and less relevant.

In tandem with the rising influence of streaming platforms like Spotify, music fans are relating to genres in different ways beyond solely treating them as musical styles with strict lyrical, instrumental and/or thematic formulas. Instead, genres become more “a reflection of different parts of people’s souls and personalities,” in the words of Marcus Martínez, co-founder and A&R at Oak Group, where he manages the rapper EGOVERT and is developing Canadian production and songwriting duo House of Wolf. Martínez claims that listeners today tend to have more complex ways of categorizing music, looking to specific artists to tap into higher-level feelings or activities. For instance, someone might listen to Hip-Hop and EDM to work out, and then proceed to play Pop to wind down and relax on their commute back home.

Alternatively, consumers today can also listen to several genres while doing one single activity. Take one of Spotify’s most followed playlists, Songs to Sing In The Shower, which features artists ranging from Lionel Richie and Whitney Houston to Harry Styles, MØ and Lewis Capaldi. These artists don’t necessarily fit in the same genre or even lane of music, but there are a wide variety of songs like “Watermelon Sugar” and “All Night Long” whose upbeat energy and emotional connotations make perfect sense for the purpose of singing in the shower.

In fact, we’re seeing this evolving role of genre categorization manifest behind the scenes, through important promotional channels like Spotify’s playlist-pitching portal for artists (pictured below). As you can see, artists have the option to pick not just musical genres, but also geographic regions, song styles, instrumentation and even moods. You can still technically pick only one musical genre, which means that emerging artists who are equal parts R&B and Disco or Rock have to make a choice based on their marketing goals. That said, making additional categorization options available is definitely a step in the right direction, in terms of adapting to the nuances of how artists and their fans relate to music today beyond genre alone.

Conclusion: New ways to categorize music

Traditional genre categories can help as marketing tools to package and sell music more easily to certain audiences, and, as described above, can help early-stage artists establish a recognizable lane before branching out into other sounds. But genres should also be understood merely as loose guidelines for a musical journey that are meant to be challenged. If the way music is created and consumed has evolved, why shouldn’t the way we describe and categorize music shift as well?

Moving forward, music rights holders and tech platforms can continue to innovate on the meaning of genre by treating it as just one piece of a wider storytelling toolkit around an artist. Many successful artists and labels today are marketing their creative output with a sharper focus on higher-level lifestyles and values instead of sonically- and lyrically-driven genres alone, drawing a stronger connection between the identity of the “talent” and that of the business.

In addition, the more that traditional genre categorization relies on subjective judgment from human beings with built-in biases, especially along racial, gender and socioeconomic lines, the more it arguably fails to do artists justice.

With that in mind, charts driven by more objective, data-driven music categorization — in the spirit of Pandora’s Music Genome Project or Spotify’s own machine-learning algorithms, which measure song features like “danceability,” “acousticness,” “speechiness” and “valence” (i.e. happiness vs. sadness) — could forge new connections among artists that were previously siloed by traditional genre criteria. For instance, you could have a “high-valence” (i.e. happier and more upbeat) and “low-valence” (i.e. more mellow and downtempo) chart on Spotify; the former would feature songs like Ed Sheeran’s “Shape Of You” (93% valence, according to Spotify), while the latter would feature songs like The Chainsmokers’ “Something Just Like This” (44% valence).

Since the music industry will always have a need to categorize and curate songs, we recommend a more objective approach at the point of marketing and delivery to the consumer, that does not hinder artists’ creative potential and commercial opportunities. Songs would be classified just as they are, with the objective characteristics that they have. While this might not translate neatly to traditional events like the Grammys — who wants a “Best Sad Song” award? — it is important for the music industry as a whole to do its job of serving both artists and fans by taking genre fluidity seriously.