Music Genre Tree
70 electronic and DJ-relevant genres as a hierarchy — BPM range, era, reference artists, and for 46 of them how many tracks we actually hold. Techno is the deepest shelf at 43,114 tracks. Click any entry for the full description; search to filter, and matches keep their parents visible so you can still see where something came from.
Click any genre to expand. Click the chevron to collapse a family.
What the tree can and cannot be counted on
46 of the 70 carry a track count. The other 24 are blank for three different reasons, and it is worth knowing which, because only one of them means we cannot help you with that genre.
Bass / Breaks, Hardstyle / Hardcore, Hip-hop / Soul, Disco / Funk, Ambient / Downtempo, Latin / Caribbean, African pop / electronic, Synth pop / Electro are headings, not tags — nothing is filed under them. Counting one means adding up its children, and the children overlap, so the total would count some tracks twice and we could not tell you which. House, techno and trance escape this because they are headings and tags in their own right, which is why they do carry a number.
2-step, Boom-bap, Dembow, Kwaito, Vaporwave have no tag of their own. They arrive filed under a bigger neighbour — boom bap inside hip-hop, 2-step inside UK garage, dembow inside the Latin bucket — so the records are in the catalog and we cannot pull them out by name. Search by artist instead.
Disco house, Garage house, Industrial techno, Acid techno, Detroit techno, Neurofunk, Brostep, Rawstyle, Trip-hop, Chillout, Synthwave are the real gap. We look for each of these by name and find nothing, so the catalog has no depth there. If one of them is your genre, this is not the site to dig in yet.
A count that does appear is the tracks left after the same outlier trim the tempo pages use, and it links through to that genre’s tempo page. Refreshed daily.
Why genre matters for DJs
Genre tags get treated as marketing categories — labels stick them on releases, Beatport sorts by them, streaming services use them for recommendations. For working DJs they have a more practical use: they tell you the production conventions a track is likely to follow. A track tagged “deep house” will probably sit 118-125 BPM, run a long groove-led intro and outro, and clip its dynamics for dancefloor playback. A track tagged “melodic techno” will probably sit 120-128, peak around a synth-led breakdown, and have at least one moment intended for a phone-camera lift.
Knowing a genre’s lineage tells you which other genres mix into it gracefully. Tech house descends from house and shares its 4/4 grid; you can blend the two without breaking groove. Tech house also has techno in its DNA, so it crosses into melodic techno or peak-time techno without sounding forced. Drum & bass descended from jungle and breakbeat — knowing that explains why DJs still pull old jungle tracks into modern DnB sets without the seams showing.
The tree also exposes the genres that exist as bridges. UK garage sits between house tempos and DnB tempos at 130-138 BPM — that’s why DJs use it to transition between the two. Trap (the EDM kind) sits between dubstep and hip-hop via the half-time bridge — the same reason. The hierarchy isn’t academic; it’s the working map most DJs build in their heads as they get better.
FAQ
How is this tree organised?
Top-level families are the broad lineages — house, techno, trance, bass / breaks, hardstyle / hardcore, hip-hop / soul, disco / funk, ambient / downtempo, Latin / Caribbean, African pop, synth pop / electro. Children sit beneath their direct ancestor genre. So drum & bass appears under bass / breaks; liquid DnB and neurofunk appear under drum & bass; jungle (DnB's ancestor) also appears under drum & bass because that's its closest active relative in 2026 even though it predates the parent name.
Why aren't every subgenre listed?
Because no taxonomy of electronic music is ever complete. We currently track 70 genres — the ones that meaningfully come up in DJ practice. Microscenes like darkpsy, autonomic, deep dubstep, twilight psytrance, jersey club and so on are real and deserve coverage; we'll add them iteratively. Submit a missing genre via the Mixgraph contact form and we'll consider it for the next update.
How is this different from the EDM Genre Chart?
The chart is flat — every genre listed once with its BPM range, sortable by tempo or popularity. Useful for quick lookup and comparison. The tree is hierarchical — it shows which genres descend from which others, the lineage of the music. Useful when you're trying to understand the relationships rather than the raw data. The two tools cover overlapping content from complementary angles.
Why are the BPM ranges sometimes different from the chart?
The tree uses the same authoritative ranges as the chart. Slight differences arise where a parent and child have overlapping but distinct ranges — house overall sits 118-132 BPM, but tech house specifically lives 122-130 within that. The parent's range is the genre's outer boundary; the child's is its working bracket.
What's the "reference" line?
Two or three artists, labels or producers whose work is closest to the genre's defining sound. Not necessarily the founders, not necessarily the most successful — just a quick "if you've heard them, you know what this genre is" cue. Useful when you're scanning the tree and want to anchor an unfamiliar name.
Related tools
Plan a cross-genre set with chemistry scoring
Cross-genre mixing, in your pocket
Mixgraph for iOS and Android — chemistry-scored DJ planning.
