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A microgenre is a specialized or niche genre, often used to describe narrowly defined subcategories within music, literature, film, or art. The term has been in use since at least the 1970s, particularly in the context of music, where it refers to specific stylistic offshoots of prominent genres, such as the many sub-subgenres of heavy metal and electronic music.
Originally, microgenres were labels retroactively applied by record collectors and dealers, often to increase the perceived value of rare or obscure recordings. Early examples include Northern soul, freakbeat, garage punk, and sunshine pop.
By the late 2000s and early 2010s, the creation and dissemination of microgenres had become increasingly associated with internet culture, where online platforms facilitated their rapid emergence, which was often tied to internet aesthetics and online trends. Notable internet-based microgenres include chillwave, witch house, seapunk, shitgaze, dreampunk, and vaporwave.
According to Reynolds, such "semi-invented" genres were sometimes pushed by record dealers and collectors to increase the monetary value of the original records. In the early 1980s, Robert Christgau coined the term "pigfuck" to describe the music of Sonic Youth, the term later took a life of its own to denote a specific style of noise rock music.
Successful attempts that resulted in widespread usage include "post-rock" (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 "Romo". That same decade, there was a trend of electronic music 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, psytrance, and hard trance. house music, drum-n-bass, dubstep and techno also contain a large number of microgenres.
In 2009, a writer for the New York Times observed that indie rock was then evolving into "an ever-expanding, incomprehensibly cluttered taxonomy of subgenres." By the early 2010s, most microgenres were linked and defined through various outlets on the internet. Each of them, according to Vice writer Ezra Marcus, were "music scenes created out of thin air". Pitchforks Jonny Coleman commented: "The line between a real genre that sounds fake and a fake genre that could be real is as thin as ever, if existent at all. This is the uncanny genre valley that publicists-cum-neologicians live in and for."
Although, shitgaze, and blog era music genres like bloghouse, Internet rap and blog rock predated it, "chillwave", coined by the ironic music blog Hipster Runoff around 2009 as an internet meme was one of the first music genres to develop primarily online. The term did not gain mainstream currency until early 2010, when it was the subject of articles by the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. Writing in 2019, journalist Emilie Friedlander, called chillwave "the internet electronic micro-genre that launched a hundred internet electronic micro-genres (think: vaporwave, witch house, seapunk, shitgaze, distroid, hardvapour), not to mention its corollaries in this decade’s internet rap, which largely shared its collagist, hyper-referential approach to sound."
In 2013, Glenn McDonald, who originally worked at the music intelligence firm the Echo Nest, which was later bought by music streaming company Spotify, developed genre mapping data that later became built into various Spotify features, including its "Daily Mix" and "Fans also like" recommendation functions. Additionally, he created the Every Noise at Once website which focused on documenting and categorizing internet-based music microgenres. In August 2019, the use of his metadata in the Spotify algorithm contributed to the curation of the influential "Hyperpop" Spotify playlist, led by Lizzie Szabo, which has been credited with the wider popularization of the movement, as McDonald had previously added the term "hyperpop" to the platform's algorithm which drew from Every Noise at Once, in 2018.
In 2020, Netflix identified 76,897 different microgenres in its algorithms, which it had used to develop successful series like House of Cards and Orange Is the New Black.
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