Musical Genre

From recent decades’ digitization have emerged a wide range of means for mapping tendencies in musical life, identifying patterns in sound or musico-cultural practices, and compiling labels, names, tags, and classes on an unprecedented scale. The result is an extensive catalogue of musical genre. This challenges scene-based or identificational understandings as these occur, for example, in popular music studies (in concepts such as ‘genre world’ or ‘genre culture’). This book offers new perspectives on musical genre fit for current times but with the potential for also reconsidering historical cases. The changing scale and pace of processes of abstraction is among the major ways in which digitization impacts current conditions of musical life.