Genre Guide 2000
ListenSmart.com sorted every song into a tree of 660 genres under 12 top-level styles. It was one of the early detailed genre guides on the web.
Each genre page quotes the definition exactly as the original site published it, with a link to the Wayback Machine capture. Where we know of a correction or a current name, a labelled 2026 note follows the original. 502 of the 660 genres had a definition; the rest were names only.
Note, 2026: For comparison: in September 1999 Webnoize counted 600 genres in Listen.com’s directory (Webnoize news digest, September 1999), and by 2000 Listen.com was defending its “genre tree” as its own (Webnoize, July 2000, Wayback Machine).
Alternative
23 genres
Classical
49 genres
Country
19 genres
Easy Listening
25 genres
Electronic/Dance
71 genres
Hip Hop/Rap
40 genres
Jazz/Blues
54 genres
Soul/R&B/Gospel
28 genres
Rock & Pop
94 genres
Spoken Word
14 genres
World/Folk
225 genres
Misc.
6 genres
How the guide aged
The structure has held up well: 328 of the 660 genres still have a counterpart among MusicBrainz genres or Discogs styles today (see the matching rule and the full list). Some definitions now need notes, for example “Black-Eyed Soul” (the usual term is blue-eyed soul) and the origin story given for G-Funk. Those notes sit on the genre pages, kept apart from the original text.