music

How to find music that matches your tastes. There are several online music stores. There are also several online columnists who edit news sites focused on digital music and the grassroots community it spawned. Finally there are sites which allow artists to choose to post their own music for free download.

R&B: Rhythm and blues is a name for black popular music tradition. The term "R&B" often refers to any contemporary black pop music.

Rock is a confusing term with multiple definitions. It can be used strictly, referring to very little music recorded after the early 1960s, or broadly, to refer to almost all popular music recorded since the early 1950s. It arose from multiple genres in the late 1940s, most importantly the jump blues. It was first popularized by performers like Bill Haley and Elvis Presley, who fused the sound with country music, resulting in rockabilly. In addition, gospel music and a related genre, R&B (rhythm and blues), emerged later in the decade. R&B soon became on of the most popular genres, with girl groups, garage rock and surf rock most popular in the US, while harder, more blues-oriented musicians became popular in the UK, which soon developed into British blues, merseybeat, mod and skiffle.

Country music is usually used to refer to honky tonk today. Emerging in the 1930s in the United States, honky tonk country was strongly influenced by the blues, as well as jug bands (which cannot be properly called honky tonk). In the 1950s, country achieved great mainstream success by adding elements of rock and roll; this was called rockabilly.

Electronic music started with the invention of the synthesizer. Some subcategories of electronic music include electronic dance music, space, new age, ambient, and the catch-all "electronica," which can sometimes include all of the above electronic sub-genres. Many people have met electronic music also in the form of video game music.

Electronic dance music There are now many subgenres of electronic music, these include: techno (mechanical sounding dance music featuring little melody and more noise), trance music (with a distinct style of instrumentation focused on complex, uplifting chord progressions and melodies), Goa trance (spawning from industrial music and tribal dance, focusing on creating psychedelic sound effects within the songs), house music (fully electronic disco music), big beat (using older drum loops and more melodic elements sampled and looped), drum and bass (an offshoot of hardcore and Jamaican dancehall, utilizing quick tempos with sampled break beats, most notably the amen break and the funky drummer), gabber or gabba, (a Dutch development on techno, which features extremely high tempos and lots of overdrive and distortion on the music, especially the base drum being distorted into a square wave tone), happy hardcore (a slightly more palatable version of Gabba, fusing elements of drum and bass as well). Of these subgenres, trance is probably the most widespread.

Electronica Electronic music that does not fall into the new age, techno or dance categories are often referred to as "left-field", or "electronica". These styles include ambient, downtempo, illbient and trip-hop, which are all related in that they usually rely more on their atmospheric qualities than electronic dance music, and make use of slower, more subtle tempos, sometimes excluding rhythm completely.

Melodic music is a term that covers various genres of non-classical music which are primarily characterised by the dominance of a single strong melody line. Rhythm, tempo and beat are subordinate to the melody line or tune, which is generally easily memorable, and followed without great difficulty. Melodic music is found in all parts of the world, overlapping many genres, and may be performed by a singer or orchestra, or a combination of the two.

In the west, melodic music has developed largely from folk song sources, and been heavily influenced by classical music in its development and orchestration. In many areas the border line between classical and melodic popular music is imprecise. Opera is generally considered to be a classical form. The lighter operetta is considered borderline, whilst stage and film musicals and musical comedy are firmly placed in the popular melodic category.

Traditional pop music overlaps a number of these categories: big band music and musical comedy, for example, are closely allied to traditional pop.

Reggae, dub and related forms In Jamaica during the 1950s, American R&B was most popular, though mento (a form of folk music) was more common in rural areas. A fusion of the two styles, along with soca and other genres, formed ska, an extremely popular form of music intended for dancing. In the 1960s, reggae and dub emerged from ska and American rock and roll.

Starting the late 1960s, a rock-influenced form of music began developing -- this was called rocksteady. With some folk influences (both Jamaican and American), and the growing urban popularity of Rastafarianism, rocksteady evolved into what is now known as roots reggae. In the 1970s, a style called Lovers rock became popular primarily in the United Kingdom by British performers of ballad-oriented reggae music. The 1970s also saw the emergence of Two Tone in Coventry, England, with bands fusing ska and punk, as well as covering original ska tracks. Punk band The Clash also used Dub and reggae elements.

Dub emerged in Jamaica when sound system DJs began taking away the vocals from songs so that people could dance to the beat alone. Soon, pioneers like King Tubby and Lee Scratch Perry began adding new vocals over the old beats; the lyrics were rhythmic and rhyme-heavy. After the popularity of reggae died down in the early 1980s, derivatives of dub dominated the Jamaican charts. These included ragga and dancehall, both of which remained popular in Jamaica alone until the mainstream breakthrough of American gangsta rap (which evolved out of dub musicians like DJ Kool Herc moving to American cities). Ragga especially now has many devoted followers throughout the world.

Reggaeton is a fusion of reggae and rap, popular in Latin America, but gradually appearing in the mainstream charts.

Punk music is a subgenre of rock music. The term "punk music" can only rarely be applied without any controversy. Perhaps the only bands always considered "punk" are the first wave of punk bands, such as the Clash and the Ramones. Before this, however, a series of underground musicians helped define the music throughout the 1970s

Despite evidence to the contrary, many refused to believe that the phenomenon could not be repeated and several so-called genres acquired followings. These 'genres' can be grouped into three categories -- hardcore punk, New Wave and alternative rock.

New Wave was the most popular genre of punk music, dominating the charts during the early 1980s. Varieties included Neue Deutsche Welle, synth pop, dream pop and the New Romantics. Of these, the most popular was synth pop, though the most critically accepted groups were the underground dream pop bands. In the 1980s, dream pop evolved into many of the most popular genres of the 1990s. This occurred primarily in Britain, with styles like jangle pop (and the Paisley Underground) and noise pop (and, later, twee pop, shoegazing). All of these styles (along with psychedelic music) contributed to the popular emergence of Britpop in the middle of the decade.

Hip hop / Rap can be seen as a subgenres of R&B tradition. Hip hop began in inner cities in the US in the 1970s. The earliest recordings, primarily from the early 1980s, are now referred to as old school rap. In the later part of the decade, regional styles developed. East Coast rap, based out of New York City, was by far the most popular as rap began to break into the mainstream. West Coast rap, based out of Los Angeles, was by far less popular until 1992, when Dr. Dre's The Chronic revolutionized the West Coast sound, using slow, stoned, lazy beats in what came to be called G Funk. Soon after, a host of other regional styles became popular, most notably Southern rap, based out of Atlanta and New Orleans, primarily. Atlanta based performers like OutKast soon developed their own distinct sound, which came to be known as Dirty South. As hip hop became more popular in the mid-1990s, alternative hip hop gained in popularity among critics and long-time fans of the music.

De La Soul's 3 Feet High and Rising (1989) was perhaps the first "alternative rap" blockbuster, and helped develop a specific style called jazz rap, characterized by the use of live instrumentation and/or jazz samples. Other less popular forms of hip hop include various non-American varieties; Japan, Britain, Mexico, Sweden, Finland, France, Germany, Italy and Turkey have vibrant hip hop communities. In Puerto Rico, a style called reggaeton is popular. Electro hip hop was invented in the 1980s, but is distinctly different from most old school hip hop (as is go go, another old style). Some other genres have been created by fusing hip hop with techno (trip hop) and heavy metal (rapcore). In the late 1980s, Miami's hip hop scene was characterized by bass-heavy grooves designed for dancing -- Miami bass music. There are also rappers with Christian themes in the lyrics -- this is Christian hip hop.

Contemporary African music: Since the 1960s, most African popular music incorporates traditional local vocal, instrumental, and percussive styles, but also draws heavily on rock, reggae, and/or hip hop. For example raï, which originated in Algeria and spread throughout North Africa and to the North African diaspora, especially in France, began with topical songs based in the local traditional music, but, starting around 1980, began to incorporate elements of hip hop.

Other notable contemporary African genres include Zulu jive (South Africa), highlife (Ghana) and in Nigeria juju music (now nearly a century old, and constantly evolving) and Afrobeat. Many African countries hae also developed their own versions of reggae and hip hop..

Classical music (or art music): The term classical music refers to a number of different, but related, genres. In a Western context, classical music is generally a classification covering music composed and performed by professionally trained artists. Classical music is a written tradition. It is composed and written using music notation, and as a rule is performed faithfully to the score. Art music is a term widely used to describe classical music and other serious forms of artistic musical expression, Western or non-Western, especially referring to serious music composed after 1950.