![]() So it makes sense that now Gen Zers are making music, they’re creating songs that defy genre, and using social media to publicise their music. Gen Z has grown up with Spotify and these looser categorisations, and relying on a streaming service that is as equally interested in mood or setting as it is in genre has impacted how we view music. A song on the “Creamy” Spotify playlist - yes, that's a real title - doesn’t have to be strictly future bass, for instance, or interpretive dance music, or bedroom indie: it can incorporate elements from all of these genres. Unsurprisingly, these playlists are a smorgasbord of genre. Although Spotify organises based on genre, it uses more fluid music categorisations as well, allowing for playlists that communicate mood ("Down in the Dumps") or activity ("Dinner with Friends"). Streaming services are important too because of the way they organise the music on their platforms. Blending different sounds becomes more likely when the music-makers themselves are constantly listening to varied genres. According to a report last year conducted by Sweety High, a Gen Z girls media company, almost 97% of Gen Z women listen to “at least five musical genres on a regular basis.” Clearly musical tastes are becoming more varied, which also impacts music-making. And importantly, those playlists are diverse. On platforms like Spotify we're now longer beholden to specific albums or specific genres we pick and choose our favourite songs to add to playlists instead. It's impossible to discuss this new, hybridised sound without also discussing the stratospheric rise of streaming services, which has completely transformed how we consume music. Now, however, younger Gen Z artists are foregoing traditional genre categorisations altogether. It wasn’t difficult to pin down which genre she belonged to, even if the genre changed between albums. Taylor Swift’s switch from country to pop, for instance, was a jump between two long-established, clearly defined sounds, so it can hardly be considered particularly transgressive. But they still belonged to traditional genre categories, even when they were transitioning from one sound to another. Millennial artists have jumped between genres in the past, but their sounds remained marketably mainstream. Of course, Gen Z aren’t the first generation to play around with genre.
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