Musical Genre

From recent decades’ digitization have emerged a myriad of techniques for mapping musical life, identifying patterns in sound or musico-cultural practices, and compiling labels, names, tags, and classes on an unprecedented scale. Proliferating genre catalogs in the context of digital platforms and the conjunction of genre with notions of, for example, mood and activity are among the consequences, which challenge prevailing scene-based and identificational understandings in musical genre studies. This book answers to this challenge. Centering on the concepts of musico-generic assemblage and abstraction, it offers new perspectives on musical genre fit for current times but with the potential for also reconsidering historical cases.

Mads Krogh is Associate Professor of Popular Music Culture at Aarhus University, Denmark. His research explores issues of genre, mediation, and practice combining inspiration from cultural sociology, assemblage, affect, and actor-network theory. In recent years, he has been particularly concerned with genre formation and classificatory practices in digital contexts of musical life. He is co-editor of six books, including Music Radio: Building Communities, Mediating Genres (Bloomsbury, 2019) and Methodologies of Affective Experimentation (2022).