[snikolic]

A little history for folks seeing this for the first time: Ishkur has been publishing and updating this for over 25 years.

Truly one of the best artifacts of "the old internet". This gives me nostalgia. So many late nights as a teenager learning about the music I loved that seemed so inaccessible where I grew up. Thank you, Ishkur.

[tern]

It's also by now subjectively very "historical." It's possible that if you continued the chart until 2025, the task of documenting all of the sub-genres would be infeasible. Electronic music has exploded in variety since 2010.

A random walk through something like this can be more helpful these days: https://www.music-map.com/ (found on HN last year)

[chhxdjsj]

Has it really though? Genuinely asking.. I’ve checked out a lot since 2010 or so but not sure I hear anything wildly different, vaporwave and sorta meme music was quite fresh but other than that im not sure.. maybe its just part of getting old and having less time to hunt around.

[caseyohara]

Yes, it has. In both breadth and depth. People paying attention know this.

Even within techno (my favorite genre), which is already a quite narrow genre in terms of sounds, the variety of novel sounds birthing new techno sub-genres over the last 10-15 years has been wild.

[mbac32768]

What's the endgame? Micro-genres of techno only five people listen to. I can't wait!

[input_sh]

I dislike calling them genres, they're more like trends or styles. One producer makes something new and unusual that breaks the established patterns, people like it a lot, other producers copy it, and that cycle continues until fans get bored and move on. That lifecycle usually lasts about 2-5 years, sometimes not even long enough to get a proper name, but if you're into the scene you know that "genre" when you hear it.

To give a recent "mainstream" example, Odd Mob has created a certain sound that blew up in popularity despite not fitting neatly in any of the existing boxes we had (tracks like Get Busy, Losing Control, Palm Of My Hands), other producers copied it and by now you have anonymous shitposters on social media complaining that most new songs sound like they were made by him.

[golergka]

As a DJ, the endgame is building a set from a variety of different kinds of music which still sounds great together but doesn’t all follow the same boring formula. And it’s pretty great.

[calenti]

More like wine - more profitable in the attention/branding market to make your own label than take someone else's.

[toomanyrichies]

Interesting that "Aphex Twin" is about 2x closer to "Boards of Canada" than "Richard D. James". Nevertheless, great resource! I expect to kill more than a few hours here lol.

[lukan]

That is a great map, that would be even greater if one could listen to each entry immediately, hard for legal reasons obviously, but maybe I can hack something quick together tomorrow, so spotify plays me whatever I click on the map..

[tern]

Post if you do—would be game-changing

[lukan]

Also it could mean already legal trouble for me. And spotifies auth mechanism anf recent changes there put me off so far

[CamperBob2]

I'm surprised that https://everynoise.com still works, but it does. At one point, I had heard that it was shut down.

[tern]

I wonder if it could be done with torrents ... or user-supplied API key. Still some legal attack surface area, but perhaps no worse than yt-dlp.

[lukan]

If users type in their (premium) credentials it is legal.

But I still cannot just take someone else project and put my things on top if it ain't open source and it isn't and there seems no indication of wanting collaboration. So I could contact him if I ever made anything, but I cannot just make and release it.

[derac]

Rateyourmusic has a very good genre section.

https://rateyourmusic.com/genres/

[consider_not]

Not sure how helpful malicious popups are to this conversation.

[gukov]

What a blast from the past! And, yeah, it looked much different 20 years ago. It was all Flash.