Spotify Has Made All Music Into Background Music
I spent much of my youth in sprawling record stores, drifting through aisles marked by signs that said things like rock, R&B, hip-hop, and—it was the ’90s—alternative. Anyone who grew up in or near a city in the later decades of the 20th century probably remembers the dial locations of classic rock, country, modern rock, “urban.” (Of course, there were also the catchall behemoths of Top 40 and adult contemporary; young snobs like me looked down on them as the presets of dilettantes.) But these days, to judge by the omnivorous listening enabled by Spotify and the stylistic free-for-alls of mega-festivals like Coachella, the genre boundaries that once defined popular music and its fandoms may be collapsing.
On the one hand, that’s hardly a surprise: Physical music stores and terrestrial radio—those two mainstays of 20th-century music consumption that depended on genre to segment and serve specific consumer markets—are coming to seem as obsolete as a yellow Sony Discman. On the other hand, the notion that musical genres might no longer matter as they once did feels more like a momentous cultural shift than merely like fallout from new distribution and marketing modes. Musical genres have long had a peculiar imaginative power and participatory quality. They aren’t just labels imposed by an industry; they’re shaped by passions and arguments, love and disgust, allegiances and disavowals.
A phrase like or calls to mind a particular aesthetic and, , and do more. They evoke a kind of person—an incomplete stereotype, certainly, but one that’s instantly legible to anyone who’s even minimally engaged with popular culture. And they also conjure communities: a crowd clad in black T-shirts, combat boots, and studded bracelets at a metal show; in Birkenstocks and cardigans at a folk club. Metalheads and folkies, separated by a chasm, each bond over a love for their chosen music, even if they might now both be endangered species.
