From the hymns of ancient Mesopotamia to modern-day pop, music has evolved into an intricate and vast art form. As of November of 2023, Spotify had over 6000 genres of music. Given this diversity, it can be hard to identify your genuine music taste and preferences if you aren’t already deeply invested in the musical world.
Finding your genres requires patience. As vocal music and theater teacher Samuel Grob puts it, “getting surprised is surprisingly difficult.” If genres you are already familiar with aren’t quite resonating with you viscerally or lyrically, it might take time and different strategies to find one that does.
To find music, I recommend using tools like Shazam that identify a song being played, to their maximum benefit. If you hear a song while in public or on an app like TikTok that speaks to you, drop everything and find out what it is. Whenever you hear music that interests you, I recommend finding the song title so you can learn more about the song and artist.
Another good way to discover different types of music is through the people around you. Pay closer attention to what music your friends, parents and siblings listen to. Ask to trade playlists, albums or artists with your peers. Friends and family, especially of different age groups, can be a great way to find artists across a vast range of popularity and genres. For junior Danny Sager, listening to music played by his dad completely diversified his music taste.
“When I was growing up, I heard the Beatles a bunch because my dad loved them, but he would always play a very selective [set] of Beatles,” Sager said. “I would hear 40-50 percent of their songs, leaving a whole other 50 [percent] to learn about… Because he had never played them, it felt like I was finding a whole magic collection when I finally got to listen to songs.”
Once you have a baseline song, artist, genre or album you like, finding new kinds of music can become pretty easy with all the current algorithms and services that exist, as long as you apply them.
Many people are subscribed to Spotify or Apple Music, yet don’t use the radio playlists based on artists, specific songs or the personalized weekly discovery playlist, which both Grob and Sager identified as especially helpful. If you’ve just begun exploring a genre, I suggest looking up Spotify playlists or running simple Google searches like “best [genre name] albums” or “artists like [artist/album]”. This is going to be a great way to begin exploring a genre, as they will introduce you to what many will consider the definitive representations of that genre.
If you want to get invested in a certain genre of music, specialized sources offer even more insight. Rating sites like Rate Your Music or Album of The Year are great tools for music discovery, covering the community-picked best albums within an wide range of subgenres and offering other discovery- related services. Looking at an artist’s influences on Wikipedia, reading music review
publications or attending music festivals are other ways to get more musically invested.
Lastly, if you’re someone who has been listening to many types of music for an extended period of time, it may be beneficial to return to music you used to listen to. You may possess the urge to immediately react with judgment regarding your old music, or you may come to happily relive the musical experience you had once heard before. Either way, it is completely natural for your opinions regarding music to transform overtime.
“Sometimes I’ll look back at what I used to listen to, and my first instinct will be to judge it and be like, ‘Oh my god, I can’t believe I used to like that,’” Grob said. “Don’t. It’s not a good or a bad thing. You just evolve always with music.”
