When you release a single, you often have to choose one or more genres. This request can come from a variety of sources including your performing rights and performance organisations, your distributor, and the platforms streaming or selling your music. If you are on platforms like Bandcamp and SoundCloud, as well as the standard streaming platforms like Spotify and Amazon Music, this can involve doing this several times.

There are several problems with these lists. For one, they are extensive and involve a great deal of scrolling, which means that your preferred choice is easy to miss. They are also pretty inconsistent. What you choose on one list is often unavailable on the others. There are also many genres that you have never heard of previously, e.g. Antideutsche, Atmospheric Doom, Arunachal Indie. Some of the lists suggest that you choose multiple genres which adds to the confusion. There are also genres that you feel you should avoid such as “Easy Listening”. Surely, your latest release is better than that.

I am old enough to remember when there was classical, pop, rock, folk, country, R&B, gospel, jazz and show music – and little else. Then, subgenres such as ska, glam rock, and disco started to appear before the start of the explosion somewhere around the late seventies and early eighties. This explosion continued through the intervening years until now, when you have to be aware of at least some of the new genres that keep appearing. Electronic music, for example, gave us subgenres such as EDM, which in turn had subgenres such as Trance, which again had subgenres such as Uplifting Trance. I am sure that Uplifting Trance, itself, has many subgenres, although I am not aware of any.

The burning question is how important is your choice of genre on these platforms. I imagine that Spotify wouldn’t put your track anywhere near an EDM playlist if you answered “Easy Listening” as your choice, but how much more it matters is not exactly clear. As such, you might spend two minutes or an entire morning deciding without realising that you should have spent more or less time on it.

Which brings us to the next question. Given that there appears to be a near-infinite number of choices, should you start a genre of your own? It certainly won’t help you answer the question, but it might give you a new-found credibility. Unfortunately, “Other – please specify” is not usually a category.

Oh well, for our new release on this particular platform let’s just choose, say, these three genres, as they are roughly appropriate, and just hope that at least one of them will appear on the list of the next platform.