Lo-fi
Swung drums slightly behind the beat, warm keys, and deliberate artefacts — vinyl crackle, tape wobble, filtered highs.
AI Music by Genre
Naming a genre in a prompt is shorthand for a tempo, a set of instruments and a production style. These pages spell out what that shorthand expands to, so you can specify the parts you care about and leave the rest.
Flip through the crate
Lo-fiDusty drums, warm keys, deliberate imperfection.- Tempo
- 70–90 BPM
- Harmony
- Minor, often jazz-inflected
Electric pianoDusty drum breakUpright or sub bassVinyl crackle
Lo-fi hip hop, 78 BPM, F minor.
Lo-fi
70–90 BPM
Dusty drums, warm keys, deliberate imperfection.
Cinematic
60–110 BPM
Orchestral scale, built to support a picture.
EDM
120–150 BPM
Four-on-the-floor, built around the drop.
Hip hop
85–150 BPM
Drums and bass first, everything else in service of the pocket.
Pop
100–130 BPM
Structure and hook above everything else.
Rock
110–160 BPM
Guitars, a real-sounding kit, and performance over precision.
Ambient
None or 50–70 BPM
Texture and time, without rhythm or resolution.
Jazz
90–140, or rubato BPM
Extended harmony, swing, and space to move.
Classical
Varies; often rubato BPM
Acoustic forces, notated form, dynamics that mean something.
Country
90–130 BPM
Storytelling first, with the arrangement staying out of the way.
Metal
60–200 by subgenre BPM
Downtuned guitars, precision, and weight.
R&B
60–100, often half-time BPM
Smooth harmony, deep low end, vocals at the centre.
Music genres, and what actually separates them
The types of music people argue about are usually distinguished by things you cannot put in a prompt — scene, decade, record label, who was in the room. The distinctions that matter when you are making a track are narrower and far more concrete: tempo range, which instruments carry the rhythm, how much of the frequency spectrum is left empty, and where the arrangement is expected to change.
Tempo does most of the separating. Boom bap and trap are both hip hop and sit forty to sixty BPM apart. House and drum and bass differ by fifty. Lo-fi and ambient overlap in tempo but not in timbre, because lo-fi is defined by deliberate degradation — tape wobble, rolled-off highs, vinyl noise — that ambient specifically avoids. Name the tempo and half the genre arrives with it.
The second separator is what the arrangement leaves out. Hip hop keeps the midrange clear because that is where a voice goes. Cinematic writing leaves dynamic headroom because dialogue will sit over it. EDM is built backwards from a drop, so everything before it is structurally subordinate. These are production rules rather than descriptions, and they are what each genre page below records.
Which genres the AI music tools themselves publish pages for is its own signal, and not the one you would guess — we counted it across the field in our study of what AI music sitemaps reveal. The genres a generator markets are not the genres it is best at.
Why this list is short
There are thousands of genre labels, and a page for each would mostly be the same page with a different noun. These twelve are the ones where the production advice genuinely differs — where knowing the tempo range and the defining instruments changes what you write in a prompt. The list grows when a genre has something specific to say, not when a keyword exists.
Inside
Twelve genres, twelve rulebooks
Each one is a set of tempo, harmony and instrument decisions rather than a mood.
1 / 5
Why this exists
Why naming the genre is not enough
A genre label gets you close. The decisions inside it get you there.
Generate music for freeSubgenre is usually a drum decision
Boom bap, trap and drill differ mostly in the rhythm section and the tempo it implies — not in era or attitude.
Tempo carries genre on its own
The same chord progression at 75 and at 128 is heard as two different kinds of music.
Instruments beat adjectives
Asking for a felt piano produces a more specific result than asking for something warm.
Every genre has its own failure mode
Perfectly quantised hip hop sounds like a demo; over-compressed ambient stops breathing. The mistakes are genre-specific.
Who it's for
Who starts from a genre
Creators with a reference
You know what it should sound like — start from the rulebook.
Producers exploring
A reference arrangement to study before building your own.
Editors matching a scene
Genre is usually decided by the picture before the music starts.
Learners
Reading twelve rulebooks side by side teaches faster than one at a time.
Frequently asked questions
What genres can AI music generators make?
All twelve covered here — lo-fi, cinematic, EDM, hip-hop, pop, rock, ambient, jazz, classical, country, metal and R&B — plus the subgenres inside each. The limit is how precisely you describe the brief.
How do I get a specific genre from an AI music generator?
Name the tempo, the instruments and the production era rather than the genre alone. "Lo-fi" produces something generic; "72 BPM, dusty swung drums, Rhodes, vinyl crackle, highs rolled off" produces lo-fi.
Which genre is easiest to generate well?
Lo-fi, ambient and cinematic underscore, because all three tolerate imperfection and none depends on a memorable hook. Pop and metal are hardest for the opposite reasons.
What BPM should each genre be?
Lo-fi 70 to 90, hip-hop 85 to 95 or 130 to 150 for trap, house 120 to 128, drum and bass near 174, and ballads 60 to 80. Each genre page carries its own range.
Can AI mix two genres?
Yes, and it often works better than either alone. Name both explicitly along with which one owns the rhythm section — that decision is what keeps a hybrid from sounding confused.
Why does my track not sound like the genre I asked for?
Almost always because the prompt named a mood rather than the mechanics. Genres are tempo, instrument and production decisions, and stating those three is what closes the gap.