Every decade has its musical style that generally makes it easy to place what decade a song was written in if you haven’t heard it before.
40s big band
50s rock and roll
60s essentially has its genre named after the decade or at least I can’t think of anything I’d call a genre.
70s punk and beginnings of heavy metal, disco
80s electro synth, rap
90s grunge, dance, R&B, trance
Etc etc. Obviously these don’t entirely define the music of the decade but are highly recognisable genres that can more often than not pinned down to a decade.
So my question is, since the 2000s I don’t see as much differentiation but that might be because I’m too old (44) and not as exposed to be music as I was in my teens, so help me pretend I’m “hip” and “with it” by giving me some clues. I’m curious to know what you think defines the music of the 2020s, what defines the 2010s and what defines the 2000s. I.e. When someone says they are going to listen to noughties music what do they put on? Etc. Or have we reached a point where music has been explored to the point new genres are much rarer to establish?
2000’s - Indie Rock / Emo / Nu Metal
2010’s - EDM songs with Pop singers and/or rappers on them
2020’s - It’s too early to say.
2010 - EDM, also dubstep (brostep) and Drum & Bass become widely popular
2010s into the early 20s had a bit of a folksy thing going for a while with Mumford and sons and some other similar bands, the sea shanty kick a lot of people went on during covid, etc.
Dubstep also happened somewhere around the 2000s-2010s
Early 2000s had some people people were still surfing 3rd wave ska
This is probably just the circles I’ve been in but folk metal feels like it’s been going pretty strong for the last 10 years or so
I also think country has been having a weird moment since around 2000 or so, some of it good, most of it not.
Vaporwave came into existence somewhere and I feel like that’s just been kind of hanging around in the background present but largely unnoticed which I think is kind of the point
Not necessarily a genre onto its own, but mashups, remixes, covers, etc. I think have kind of become a surprisingly huge thing.
I don’t think the 2000s have much of anything. We keep remaking old things.
2000s had pop punk!
Also a big phase of emo/screamo/hardcore/post-hardcore, etc.
MTV2 and Fuse TV were briefly cool and went back to music videos.
My partner says all the music I listen to is just people whining. Can’t say it’s not true.
I don’t follow music much, but I have a guess anyway. It seems like the number and diversity of genres just absolutely exploded since trading .mp3 files became a thing. And with digital stores and YouTube, distribution isn’t a hurdle anymore, publishers don’t have to pick and choose which albums to release, they can just do ‘all’ of them.
So there’s just no longer one single sound that can define a decade the way it used to be, now people hear hundreds of wildly different bands in a year instead of a few dozen that were hand picked by studios because they had trendy sounds.
And maybe this answer is kinda what I was thinking of. The justification your are supplying about the diminished influence of record labels makes sense and logically I can see that probably means the sound of the decades I listed was less organic and more manufactured. I also feel that there is probably less air for experimental genres to establish and become dominant like in the past.
2000s, like others have said, was pop-punk, emo, nu metal. 2010s were cloud rappers, mumble rap, and bro country. 2020s I think are seeing a resurgence of pop, though with more aggression (both sonically and lyrically), and progressive subgenres of larger genres, as well as a lean towards inclusivity regarding sexual identity and preference. We won’t know until it’s over, though. We aren’t even to have half-way mark of the 20s yet.
