Microgenre

A microgenre is a specialized or niche genre. Historically, they were designed by writers seeking to coin a new style of music by linking together a group of disparate artists. Additionally, genres are sometimes retroactively created by record dealers and collectors as a marketing tool to increase the monetary value of certain records. By the early 2010s, most microgenres would be linked and defined through various outlets on the Internet, usually as part of generating popularity and hype for a newly perceived trend. Examples of these include chillwave, witch house, seapunk, shitgaze, vaporwave, and cloud rap.

Historically, microgenres were designed by writers seeking to coin a new style of music by linking together a group of disparate artists. Successful attempts that resulted in widespread usage include post-rock (Simon Reynolds) and hauntology (Mark Fisher). In the mid 1990s, Melody Maker journalists went so far as to make up fictional bands to justify the existence of an updated New Romantic scene they dubbed "Romantic Modernism". That same decade, there was a trend of electronic and dance music producers who created specialized descriptions of their music as a way to assert their individuality. In the instance of trance music, this desire led to progressive trance, Goa trance, deep psytrance, and hard trance.The Washington Post's Lavanya Ramanthan characterizes house, drum-n-bass, dubstep and techno as having "roughly a million of its own microgenres." Reynolds himself references the "genre-as-retroactive-fiction" to as early as Northern soul and garage punk, both coined in the early 1970s, and later followed by freakbeat and sunshine pop. These kinds of genres are sometimes designed by record dealers and collectors to increase the monetary value of the original records.

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