What's your style?

What type of music do you listen to?

Have you been asked that question before? Maybe from a potential date, maybe even on a date?

I have been. The answer seems to change a lot. Sometimes, its “A bit of everything” or “you know….similar to X band”, yet other times it is completely different.

Have you ever found yourself in a similar situation?

The solution: find your Genre!

So what is a genre? Technically its probably something associated more with professional muso’s who are focused around the “music language”. I play the drums and have been in several bands and don’t understand how this works, so let’s leave that for the people who studied music in college.

What I am talking about is more the “style” of music that we listen too and the broad classification that the majority of our favourite songs and albums would fall into.

Once we find this out I believe it becomes a lot easier to actively pursue new and different music that we like.

The main (widely) accepted style/genres are: Pop, Rock, Jazz, R & B, Rap, Country, Blues, Electronic, Latin, Reggae, World, Classical, give or take a few extra’s in there.

However, I do not believe that by saying “I like pop music” or “R & B music is my genre” really tells 1. Yourself and 2. anyone else what sort of music you like, effectively making it useless trying to find new/different bands with similar styles of music.

So What do we do now?

Firstly, I don’t think it is important to know every style of music that possibly exists in the world to truly find your own. Hence, I have come up with a quick and hopefully easy system to help you out with finding the 1-10 “sub genre’s” you need to know in order to ‘once and all’ put your finger on what type of music you like:

The System

Step 1: Go to www.allmusic.com

Step 1 - All Music

Step 2: Type in your favorite band. NB: not only should it be your favourite, but also one that makes you think “I would do anything to find a new band with similar sort of music to this one!”. If your number 1 favourite does not fit these criteria, then go onto number 2.

Step 3: specifically note the “styles” column and what styles this band falls under.

Step 3 - styles!

Step 4: From here there are a number of things you can do: 1. find similar artists straight away. 2.  Compare against moods you enjoy (moods column) 3. Or one of my favourites: click on the “style” you think is most relevant and you get can get lots and lots of suggestions of the top bands associated within this Genre.

Step 4 - new music and band suggestions!

Step 5: Repeat steps 1-3 above until you have found YOUR GENRE (top 1-10 styles)

For your interest my main styles are: Indie Rock/pop/electronic, Alternative Rock, New Wave/post punk revival. These style’s appeared again and again as I typed in the myriad of artists that I like.

Take Action

1. Pretty simple: complete steps 1-5 above, find your genre, and do your best to find other music (especially new and upcoming bands/artists) within the same style that YOU love to listen too.

What do you think? What genres did you come up with? Do you have any other methods for finding new and cool music?