Genre to try
Draw a random music genre - as a songwriting challenge or something new to hear.
Runs locally in your browser. Nothing you generate is ever sent to a server.
Press "Generate Genre" to see a result here.
Family
Press Generate and a genre comes up. The list goes well past the dozen genres that dominate streaming front pages, taking in shoegaze, klezmer, bossa nova and gamelan alongside rock and pop.
The most useful way to use this is to accept a genre you would never have chosen. Writing inside an unfamiliar set of conventions teaches you what those conventions are doing, and you take something back to your own music even when the experiment fails. A producer who only makes techno learns more from one attempted country song than from another techno track.
Set the quantity to two and try to write something that sits between them. This is not an artificial exercise: a great many genres began as exactly this collision, from jazz fusion to reggaeton. The pairs that seem impossible are usually the interesting ones.
Recommendation engines are built to give you more of what you already play, which narrows your listening over time without you noticing. Drawing a genre at random and searching for a starter playlist is a blunt but effective way out of that loop.
The list is filtered to the family you chose, then a genre is drawn using your browser's cryptographic random source with rejection sampling, so no genre is favoured. Batches without repeats use a Fisher-Yates shuffle driven by the same source.
Press Generate and one genre comes up. Press again for another, or raise the quantity for a list.
Yes. The filter covers popular, rock, electronic, jazz and blues, classical, and world music.
Yes. Drawing a genre you would never choose is the point - writing a country song when you only write techno teaches you more than another techno track.
Yes. Set the quantity to two and try to write something that sits between them. Most interesting genres started exactly that way.
Yes. Draw a genre and search for a starter playlist. It breaks the loop of listening to the same three things a recommendation engine keeps offering.
Yes. Each genre is drawn with your browser's cryptographic random source, so every genre in the chosen family has an equal chance.