What Genre Is My Music? The Problem With Being a Genreless Artist

One of the questions I have struggled with most throughout my entire life as an artist sounds like it should be incredibly simple: what genre is your music?

I hate this question. Not because I don't understand genre or because I think my music is somehow too unique to be categorized, but because I genuinely never know what answer is accurate. Depending on the song, I could tell you alternative pop, indie, R&B, electronic, or something somewhere between all of them. Every answer feels partially right and partially like I am describing somebody else's music.

It becomes an even stranger problem when you start releasing music professionally because suddenly genre isn't just something people ask you at parties. Spotify wants to know. Distributors want to know. Blogs want to know. Playlists want to know. Every time you upload a song, you are presented with dropdown menus asking you to translate something you made instinctively into a category that a computer can understand.

For years, I thought I was doing something wrong because I couldn't.

What Does It Mean to Be a Genreless Artist?

Being a genreless artist doesn't necessarily mean that your music has no genre. Almost every song contains recognizable influences, production styles, instruments and traditions that can be connected to existing genres.

For me, being genreless means that none of those categories feels like the thing defining the music.

I might make one song that leans heavily into alternative pop and another with obvious R&B influences. Something else might have electronic production underneath a vocal that doesn't feel particularly electronic at all. I don't sit down before making a song and decide which section of Spotify I want it to belong to. I usually start with whatever I am feeling, and the sound gets built around that.

The problem comes afterward, when somebody asks me to explain what I just made.

Why Is It So Hard to Choose a Music Genre?

Genre used to serve a very practical purpose. If you walked into a record store looking for jazz, somebody needed to know which section of the store to send you toward. Radio stations were organized around formats, record labels had specialized departments and music publications built audiences around particular scenes.

Streaming changed the way a lot of us experience those boundaries.

I didn't grow up walking into a store and buying one record from one section. I grew up with essentially the history of recorded music available through a search bar. You can listen to an R&B song, then an alternative record, then hip-hop, then electronic music without ever consciously deciding that you have changed genres.

Naturally, artists who grew up listening that way started making music that way too.

That doesn't make genre irrelevant. Genres carry history, culture and musical traditions that shouldn't simply be erased because streaming exists. But it does make the expectation that every modern artist should fit neatly inside one category feel increasingly disconnected from how music is actually being consumed and created.

The Spotify Genre Question Used to Stress Me Out

I've been learning about releasing music independently since I was around 15, and one of the things I became obsessed with early on was Spotify editorial playlists.

When you prepare music for release and pitch it through Spotify for Artists, you are asked to give Spotify information that helps contextualize the record. That makes complete sense from an editorial perspective, but I used to completely overthink those questions.

Genre was always the worst one.

I'd sit there wondering whether choosing alternative instead of pop could somehow determine who heard the song. Maybe the editor who would love it was looking somewhere else. Maybe I was describing it incorrectly. Maybe selecting the wrong category meant the song would never reach the person it was supposed to reach.

Looking back, I gave those dropdown menus an absurd amount of power.

There was also a deeper insecurity underneath it. I thought that if I couldn't clearly explain my genre, maybe it meant I didn't understand my own identity as an artist yet.

I don't really believe that anymore.

Do Artists Need to Have One Genre?

From a marketing perspective, having a recognizable sound can absolutely help. People like understanding what they're listening to, and the music industry needs language to communicate quickly. Saying an artist makes “alternative R&B” immediately gives somebody more information than saying, “You'll understand when you hear it.”

But having an identity is not necessarily the same thing as having one genre.

An artist's identity can come from their voice, writing, production choices, visual world, emotional perspective or even the way they move between different sounds. Consistency doesn't have to mean recreating the same song in slightly different forms for the rest of your career.

This distinction took me a long time to understand.

I used to think I needed to discover my genre. Now I'm much more interested in discovering what makes something unmistakably mine, regardless of what genre somebody eventually uses to describe it.

How Do You Describe Music That Doesn't Fit Into One Genre?

If you're an independent artist struggling with this, I don't think the solution is to start calling everything “genreless” and refuse to categorize your music at all. Categories are still useful, especially when you're uploading music, pitching publications, communicating with collaborators or helping new listeners understand what you make.

Instead, I think it helps to treat genre as a description rather than an identity.

Ask yourself what the individual song sounds like rather than what you, as a human being, are required to be forever.

Maybe this song is alternative pop. Maybe the next one leans R&B. Maybe another has electronic production. Those descriptions can all be true without requiring you to choose one as the permanent definition of your artistry.

You can also describe music through references beyond genre. Is it intimate or enormous? Dark or euphoric? Minimal or chaotic? What kind of environment does it belong in? What emotions keep appearing in your writing? Which production choices seem to follow you from record to record?

Sometimes those answers tell you more about an artist than a genre ever could.

Genreless Music Isn't Actually New

Artists have been crossing genre boundaries long before streaming existed, and some of the most interesting moments in music history happened because somebody took ideas that supposedly belonged in separate places and put them together.

What feels different now is the speed at which those influences can travel.

A teenager making music in their bedroom can have access to decades of soul, rock, electronic, jazz, hip-hop, folk, Bollywood, punk, R&B and experimental music without needing permission to enter any of those worlds as a listener. That amount of exposure inevitably changes what comes back out when people start creating.

I think that is part of why terms like genre-fluid and genreless have become so useful. They aren't necessarily new genres themselves. They're ways of acknowledging that the borders have become increasingly porous.

Spotify even has an editorial playlist called POLLEN, which describes itself around the idea of being genreless and putting quality first. My song “Tender” was recently added to it, which felt strangely full circle after spending so many years worrying about what genre box I was supposed to check.

I wrote about that experience separately here:

How My Song Got on Spotify POLLEN Without an Editorial Pitch

Maybe Your Genre Isn't the Most Interesting Thing About You

I wish I could go back and tell my 15-year-old self this.

Choose the genre that most accurately describes the song. Give Spotify useful information. Learn how the industry works. Understand where your music sits culturally and respect the history of the sounds you're borrowing from.

Then stop thinking about the dropdown menu.

The more music I make, the less interested I become in finding the perfect word that explains all of it. I would rather spend that energy making the next song and slowly discovering the things that remain consistent even when the production changes.

Maybe years from now somebody will find the perfect genre for everything I've made. Maybe listeners will decide it for me. Maybe I'll eventually hear one word and think, Oh, that's exactly what this is.

For now, I'm comfortable not knowing.

I spent years thinking that being difficult to categorize meant I hadn't figured myself out as an artist yet. I'm starting to think the opposite might be true. Maybe figuring yourself out means becoming comfortable enough with your own taste that you no longer need every part of yourself to fit inside the same box.

And maybe the better question isn't, What genre am I?

Maybe it's, Does this sound like me?

Listen to My Music

If you found this because you're an artist trying to figure out what genre your music belongs to, you can hear what I mean in my own work.

Listen to “Tender” by Selina: https://open.spotify.com/track/7bcfMYWR2ItosoulqmDxgv?si=4b2263d2ad064c3b