Do Genres Still Matter in a Playlist-Driven World?

By Brandy Lesline

I spent twenty minutes last Tuesday scrolling through Spotify, unable to decide what to listen to. Not because I lacked options—I had endless playlists at my fingertips—but because I could not quite articulate what I actually wanted to hear. My usual anchors had vanished. I was not in the mood for “country music” or “pop.” The genre categories that once made navigation simple suddenly felt irrelevant.

This moment of digital paralysis crystallized something I have been wrestling with for years: we are living through the slow dissolution of genre as a meaningful organizing principle for music.

There is a seductive argument that genres are dying, and the evidence seems overwhelming. Streaming platforms have largely abandoned alphabetical genre browsing in favor of algorithmic playlists named after moods, activities, and aesthetics rather than sonic categories. Artists routinely blend influences across traditional boundaries without apology. A teenager discovering music today navigates through “Sad Girl Summer” and “Study Beats,” not “Alternative Rock” or “R&B.” The streaming era has atomized how we consume music, fragmenting it into micro-targeted feeds that care far more about engagement metrics than taxonomy.

Yet I would argue that rumors of genre’s death are greatly exaggerated.

Yes, the way we encounter music has transformed radically. But genres have not disappeared—they have become invisible infrastructure rather than visible signposts. When Spotify’s algorithm recommends music, it is still processing genre data beneath the surface. When record stores organize their inventory or music journalists review albums, genre remains the fundamental language of critical discourse. Artists may resist strict categorization, but they still understand genre conventions deeply enough to know which ones to break and why.

The real shift is not genre’s irrelevance, but its transformation from a consumer-facing category into something more fluid and context-dependent. We have moved from asking “What genre do you listen to?” to asking “What’s the vibe?” Yet that vibe is still constructed from genre’s DNA. When you love “lofi hip-hop beats,” you are engaging with genre—even if you are not naming it explicitly.

What troubles me more than genre’s decline is what we lose when we stop naming things. Genre served a crucial function beyond mere organization: it created community. Identifying as a “metalhead” or “jazz enthusiast” connected you to a lineage, a cultural touchstone, and a set of values and aesthetics that extended beyond the music itself. Genre communities had friction, debate, and gatekeeping problems, but they also fostered genuine solidarity and shared meaning-making.

Algorithmic playlists are efficient but atomizing. They deliver exactly what you want, when you want it, but they do not encourage you to defend your tastes, discover why you love something, or build deeper knowledge. A playlist is a consumption experience; a genre is a conversation.

I am not advocating for a return to rigid categorization or the days when experimental artists felt trapped by labels. The democratization of music production and distribution has been genuinely liberating. Artists creating in 2024 should not feel compelled to fit neatly into pre-existing boxes.

But perhaps we have overcorrected. In our rush to transcend limiting categories, we have abandoned something valuable: the act of naming, organizing, and arguing about what music means—and who we are through our relationship to it. Genres, at their best, are not cages; they are maps. They are frameworks that help us navigate the overwhelming abundance of sound in the world.

The playlist-driven world has not killed genres so much as rendered them invisible. They still shape everything about how music is created, discovered, and understood, but we have stopped explicitly acknowledging them. We have traded transparent categories for opaque algorithms and, in the process, lost some of the joy of intentional curation and meaningful taxonomy.

So do genres still matter? Absolutely. The question is whether we will continue to acknowledge that fact, or whether we will keep pretending that our carefully curated playlists emerged from nowhere—untethered from the historical and cultural lineages that made them possible. The algorithm will not tell you this truth. We have to.