Music genres are defined by boundary strength and internal variety rather than the labels found on a streaming app.
Playlist data shows that how people actually listen to music creates communities that ignore traditional categories like Rock or Jazz. Most listeners assume that genre labels are an accurate map of musical styles and cultural tastes. This analysis reveals two independent dimensions of boundary and differentiation that govern how songs are grouped together. A song might belong to a community with a very hard border even if its label suggests it is mainstream and accessible. Understanding these hidden dimensions explains why certain niche genres survive while others merge into the background.
Two-Dimensional Structural Characterization of Music Genre Communities in Playlist Co-occurrence Networks
arXiv · 2604.26119
Music genre classification shapes how listeners discover music, how platforms design recommendations, and how sociologists study cultural taste. Yet existing genre labels are inconsistent in granularity: they exaggerate boundaries between overlapping categories and hide sociologically important heterogeneity within broad labels. Cultural sociologists have long theorized that genres vary along two independent dimensions, boundary strength and internal differentiation, but existing empirical work